“empiricism” and “intersubjective” are not the same terms. Neither is “objective” and “intersubjective”.
Empiricism is “Theory that states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience”
ALL experience comes from sensory experience. But that includes personal experience that is NOT intersubjective.
Putting a “number on it” does not guarantee intersubjectivity. All you need to do is remember Fleischman and Pons and cold fusion. They had numbers. They were empirical. BUT, they failed intersubjectivity because no one else got comparable numbers under approximately the same circumstances – intersubjective. Also, my example did not “put a number on it”, did it? No one has “put a number” on the visual of the impression of feathers in Archie fossils. But they are still intersubjective.
Objective also is not intersubjective. Objective:
" 1. Existing independent of or external to the mind; actual or real.
“objective reality.”
2. Based on observable phenomena; empirical."
Again, Fleischmann and Pons measurement of heat given off in their experiment was objective: outside their minds. But it was not intersubjective. As another example, Thomas the disciple is said to have an objective experience when he placed his hands in the nail holes in the hands of the risen Jesus. But it is not intersubjective, since not everyone can do so, can they?
It is important to keep these terms separate. Confusing them can lead to erroneous conclusions. You did so when thinking “intersubjective” is always different from “subjective”. This paper deals only with subjective experience – phantom limb pain. It’s not objective as in “outside the person”. But it is intersubjective. Enough that the authors are confident to recommend amputation as a medical treatment to benefit patients. . N Honkamp, A Amendola, S Hurwitz, CL Saltzman, Retrospective review of eighteen patients who underwent transtibial amputation for intractable pain. J. Bone Joint Surg. 83-A 1479-1483, Oct. 2001.
Human experience is mostly personal experience that his NOT intersubjective. Science restricts itself only to intersubjective experience. Personal experience is not regarded as “wrong”, per se, but it is not part of science.
Knowledge comes from the patterns we abstract from and impose upon perceptual experience and from engineering ways to enhance our perceptual experience.
perceptual - it is now a known fact we have from the science of psychology that perception in not independent from belief, and indeed sensory data is useless without patterns we already have for giving significance to the raw data.
patterns - the essence of knowledge is the derivation of rules we can follow, in order to guide our actions and responses toward desired results.
abstract from and impose - it is iterative (circular) process. We cannot get knowledge without perception and we have no perception without knowledge.
engineering - this is not a passive process. It takes more than simply watching or simply letting the data come to us. We have to interact with the environment and find ways to make it to give up its secrets, so to speak.
This gives me a reason to smile - my comment was to point out the problematic with regard to combining theology with ToE, not to focus on the latest version of the biology paradigm. I am not ‘shocked’ by ToE, nor any other theory of the Sciences. But to ease your concerns, I am aware that evolutionary concepts for biology have ‘evolved’ from Darwinism, to Neo-Darwinism, Modern Synthesis and some sort of extended evolution, and my comment is relevant, on the falacies that could emerge if any or all of these are viewed as how God does things.
Yes, if each sample point is the average (or other figure) of an entire experiment with several individuals, the results of the statistical analyses with 3 cases are much stronger than in the case of using just 3 individuals.
It is good to remember that all those details of statistical analyses only matter because of one goal: that the reader would believe what we claim. Statistical analyses would be unnecessary, even trivial, if we can justify our claim in some other way. The problem with scientists is that they are trained to be critical, to doubt claims that are not shown to be true or at least likely. Authority or faith are irrelevant matters in this context. That is why it may sometimes demand rather complicated analyses to convince the scientists.
Edit:
By the way, even ecological experiments may sometimes have no or a very small number of replicates because of various constraints. A good example of this is the study of snowshoe hare populations in Canada (the Kluane project). To study the role of predation and food in the population cycles of snowshoe hare, the researchers established experimental plots. Because of the scales of movement, each experimental plot was one km2. Two of the plots were surrounded by electrical fences to keep the carnivores out of the plots. You can imagine the amount of funding and work needed to make enclosures the size of a square km in forest and keep these fences working so that carnivores could not enter the enclosures, not even by digging below the fence or jumping over the fences. They replicated the food addition experiments and controls but could not build more than two predator exclusion fences due to financial and logistic reasons. Yet, they got interesting and valued results from these experiments (an example of the papers they produced is Krebs et al. 1995. Impact of food and predation on the snowshoe hare cycle. Science 269: 1112-1115).
I am a little intruiged to know why you think it cannot stand scrutiny? Maybe because it relies on the existence of God?
In truth what is actually done is to scrutinise ToE and decide that it cannot work without God (or Intelligence) As I said elsewhere the actual data will be the same whether God is involved or not, because Science will not see or account for God in its findings.
You keep coming back to this false comparison. The weatheer has absolutely nothng to do with ToE.
The weather can work without any sort of Godly intervention, as in "light the blue touch paper and retire immediately. it is self contained, and predictable. ToE is neither. It tries to be self contained and fails.
Weather has everything to do with the argument you are making. If you have no problem with weather being described in terms of natural processes, then why would it be any different in the case of explaining biodiversity?
Are the same fallacies present in all scientific descriptions in all scientific fields? If not, what makes evolution different?
Earlier you spoke of God creating the heavens and the Earth. So do these same problems extend to scientific descriptions of how galaxies, stars, planets, and moons form?
I am not going to repeat several hundred posts just to answer your so say innocent question.
All you ae proving is that you have no concept of Evolution or the weather, otherwise you would understand the difference. And before you claim this is not just out of my head. I told you the difference. Just because you think ToE can get from zero to human by itself does not mean it actually can. DNA be d@mned! You still have to make the connections, let alone justify their existence.
Richard
PS perhaps @GJDS can show you better than I can where evolution is different
Both are describing natural phenomena through natural processes, but you only protest against one of them because it doesn’t include God even though neither of them include God.
What you describe as “knowledge” are theories and explanations. The actual knowledge of what is out there in the universe comes from our senses: what we see, hear, taste, touch, smell, or feel emotionally. Yes, we can use theories, i.e. electronics, to give us an LED readout of pH, say. BUT, our knowledge comes from actually seeing the LED.
What we conclude or think from our senses can very much be influenced by our biases. For instance, although we all see feather impressions, teeth, and a tail in fossils of Archaeopteryx. Nearly everyone concludes Archie is an intermediate, mosaic of features of birds and dinosaurs. Duane Gish, however, concluded that Archie was a bird.
Or take the the photographs of the crowds at Obama’s first inauguration and Trump’s inauguration. Nearly everyone concluded that Obama’s crowd was much larger, covering much more of the ground. Trump, however, concluded that the crowed at his inauguration was bigger. This isn’t “alternative facts”, but “alternative conclusion”.
What knowledge do we get without perception?
As to engineering, I would call that “experimentation”. But even interacting with the environment, do we not then perceive through our senses what is different before and after the interaction?
Kai, I must not have been clear. The sample points were the individual Boyden chambers. Each experiment had 20 chambers – 10 for controls and 10 for experimental. The statistics were run on each experiment. Thus I had 3 experiments each with a p < 0.05. Each experiment was independent. It is a matter of reproducibility, not statistics. Other experiments I have done were only run once. For instance, this study: Lucas, P.A., Warejcka, D.J., Zhang, L-M., Newman, W.H., and Young, H.E. Effect of rat mesenchymal stem cells on development of abdominal adhesions after surgery. J. Surg. Res., 62: 229-232 1996. Someone else is going to have to do another animal study to see if they get comparable results to mine. I can say that, since the controls were identical to other studies, that the controls replicated the results seen with other groups using this animal model.
"Statistical analyses would be unnecessary, even trivial, if we can justify our claim in some other way. "
Statistical analyses are absolutely necessary when individuals have natural variation. It’s the only way to know whether the difference you see between groups is due to chance or to the experimental manipulation.
As I said, where the phenomenon does not exhibit variation between individuals, then you don’t need statistics. All you need is to determine the variables and find the deterministic equation. Once you have the equation, then it is a matter of plugging in the values. For instance, determining whether a chemical reaction is spontaneous is deltaG = deltaH -T/deltaS. Measure deltaH, T, and deltaS and then calculate deltaG. If deltaG is negative, the reaction is spontaneous. If deltaG is positive, the reaction is not spontaneous. No statistics required.
As you noted with the ecology experiment you cited, the samples are not individual hares, but the ecology. A single 1 km^2 plot would not be sufficient. It would be a sample of 1. That is what happened to the paper you submitted; you had a sample of 1.
What you articulated is the Christian view of “two books”. St. Augustine is the oldest statement of this I have found.
You might be interested to know that Christians already answered whether it was the book of creation or scripture that had to change interpretation:
“If sound science appears to contradict the Bible, we may be sure that it is our interpretation of the Bible that is at fault.” Christian Observer, 1832, pg. 437
Notice this was 27 years before Darwin. The trigger was the age of the earth and a world-wide Flood. The book of creation showed the earth was very old and there never had been a world-wide Flood. If you are interested, the book Genesis and Geology by Charles Gillespie goes into detail.
When we talk of how God does this or that, we are indulging in error, and this has been discussed many times - we are not in a position to observe ‘God in action’ so to speak. Thus, when we speak of God creating the heavens and earth, we are quoting scripture, and the discussion would be of faith, revelation and theology in general. The Church has discussed a doctrine regarding the Energies of God and this is theology that addresses creation and sustaining it.
We often speculate on how the creation is and unfolds and science would be relevant to this. My personal view is that human beings are just ‘too unique’ to be simply explained the way evolutionists do; but this is a big subject, and I am not discussing this. My contribution to this discussion is on the way the term ‘scientific law’ appears to be used. If we try to conclude that God acts in a certain way from incomplete studies, we are bound to err. If on the other hand, we consider God as the creator, and His ways are inscrutable, then nature is part of the creation which we as intelligent beings have been given the privilege to study and understand (and hopefully to appreciate and protect). When we understand the entire planetary ecological system, we may be able to ask how life is sustained. We are scientifically a long way from this.
“it is the combination, or integration, of theology and Darwinian evolution, and as such cannot withstand scrutiny.”
The “theistic” part of theistic evolution is belief. However, many Christians have analyzed the belief that God used evolution to create species and it has withstood all that religious scrutiny.
“Christians should look on evolution simply as the method by which God works.” Rev. James McCosh, theologian and President of Princeton, The Religious Aspect of Evolution, 2d ed. 1890, pg 68.
Of course, there are several articles here in BioLogos that show TE is valid as theology.
Evolution, of course, has withstood all scientific scrutiny and is proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
On the podcast I posted about earlier today with Jim Stump, he discussed that a bit, as how we seem to be both a part of the ordered creation, but also something unique and different at the same time, so not sure it has anything to do with evolution, but rather evolutionism. So I guess the linguistic vagueness of evolutionists comes into play, if you are defining as evolutionist as equivalent to a scientific naturalist.
I am a simple scientist and the many descriptions and linguistics on this subject leave me scratching my head. I have come across statements from strident atheists that eliminate everything except evolution (which version?).
I try to view matters from a perspective that is wider than natural sciences. Your comment represents a researcher that looks at matters through his experience in research work. I can understand that as my training is also within science and I have worked with living entities, using statistical analyses to support or refute hypotheses. Yet, statistics is just a tool we use to convince others (and ourself) that a hypothesis seems to be valid. At a more fundamental level, any tool or justification that can be used to reach the same goal could be used instead of statistics. We often do not have better means available, which makes statistics seem so important in the scientific context.
Statistics has its limits as it only deals with probabilities, using the available data. The calculated probabilities may vary somewhat depending on the details of the statistical analyses - each statistical model is answering a slightly different question, leading to differences in the outcome. From the viewpoint of a researcher, details are important. From a wider perspective, statistical details and even statistics itself are (mostly) very minor points and can be omitted in the general discussion, assuming we only promote claims that have adequate justification.
Incorrect. What I describe is the way meaning is given to the data from our senses, which is how they are used to guide our actions. It can be as simple as… I know if I go straight past that tree I will get to a place where I can get water. Calling this theory is ridiculous. It is the knowledge we get from our experiences.
No. It is not. The empty video recording of an empty corridor where nothing happens is not knowledge. It is not even perception which psychologist have proven to be a product of an interaction between the data of our senses and our beliefs.
We do not know WHAT we see, hear, touch, smell or feel OUT THERE. All we know is how we have interpreted those things which can be vastly different from one person to another even when what is out there is exactly the same.
None. Which is the whole point. Perception comes first. And psychologist have proven that there is no perception independent of our beliefs.
Thanks for the reply, and thanks for the explanation. I think we can leave that part of our discussion where it lays.
To resurrect a dead beaten horse, I view ecology in much the same light as I view weather. Weather is a chaotic and complex system, and we can only ever describe long term trends in generalities and never with specifics. For example, we can’t predict what the specific weather will be at a specific site 10 months from now. However, I think everyone agrees that we understand the mechanisms of what causes weather, and we find those explanations to be sufficient. Evolution and ecology fit that same mold, in my eyes.
I think that “constrained” is the term I’ve seen used, with the things that limit a river’s channel as analogy.
I love coming across things we didn’t learn in botany classes!
Though I do recall that the modern strawberry is a cross carried out on the cellular level in a lab and was something that could not have occurred in nature.