Does Science Explain Anything?

[Roy (Roy (Listener twice correct))]

@1Cor15.54

@Roy

Neither link includes anything about scientific knowledge being the only true knowledge

Claiming that we know that there is no afterlife and that the afterlife is impossible is not (on top of being a falsehood) equivalent to claiming that scientific knowledge is the only true knowledge, …

No, it’s not.

Rejecting one (supposed) source of non-scientific knowledge is not the same as rejecting all sources of non-scientific knowledge.

Or, more simply, rejecting religious ‘knowledge’ is not the same as only accepting scientific knowledge.

If you can’t come up with an example of some-one actually saying the equivalent of ‘only scientific knowledge is true knowledge’, then your claim is just vapour.

(I’ll add that AFAIK Sean Carroll does not consider philosophy and metaphysics useless.)

[1Cor15.54 (Massimiliano)]

@Roy

(I’ll add that AFAIK Sean Carroll does not consider philosophy and metaphysics useless.

In a way this is true, because even philosophical naturalism is a philosophy.

But he clearly believe that science can offer a comprensive knowledge or reality, otherwise he wouldn’t have made the utterly foolish and arrogant statement he made. That much is obvious.

With “true knowledge” i meant knowledge about ultimate reason (or lack thereof, in their case) of why there is something instead of anything. Sean Carrol claimed that we know that there is no spiritual world, and these are the words of someone who very clearly believes that science can offer, in due time, a complete knowledge of reality, claiming that we know there is no spiritual world is one of the most outlandish claims I have ever heard from a scientist.

[Jay313 (Jay Johnson)]

@Vinnie

But even here the major and minor scales you refer to are just more refined descriptive statements. A musical scale is a specific sequence of frequency ratios ordered by pitch. How does piling on more descriptive statements lead to an explanation of why?

Frequency is described by math. That’s how pianos and guitars and sitars are tuned. It’s also why kids who learn music at an early age are better at math (whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, 16th notes and such).

Now, why does the artist play one note instead of another? The first note could be chosen randomly, but the second establishes a pattern, and if he/she isn’t playing random notes, we know why the third note was chosen. There’s a pattern to be found. Remember the old game show “Name That Tune”? Three notes was all it took for contestants to name a song. And I think most of us have experienced an unfamiliar worship song that we could sing without much trouble. Color and brightness are merely equivalent to tempo, staccato/legato, etc.

Music and poetry are really bad analogies for science. Both require an intelligence behind them, which seems to be the whole point. The scientific method, as everyone with a high school education should know, cannot take “supernatural” explanations into account.

In my opinion, there’s exactly zero evidence (as @Roy has highlighted) that the culture in the United States has brainwashed the mass of people into believing that science must be believed above all else. In fact, the opposite seems to be true of evangelical Christians, who at the moment are mired in an anti-science morass of conspiracy theories involving everything from the age of the earth to the efficacy of vaccines.