On 11/01/2021 22:04, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2021-01-11, Martin Gregorie  wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 11 Jan 2021 20:56:41 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, 11 Jan 2021 04:43:50 +0000 The Natural Philosopher
>>>  wrote:
>>>
>>>> Physicists started to realise that physics wasn't about uncovering
>>>> truths so much as simply creating models that worked. Karl Popper
>>>> elucidated the whole position of science rather well in that respect.
>>>> And once you move science out of the realm of 'truth discovery' and
>>>> into the realm of 'model invention', you run into the Problem of
>>>> Induction.
>>>
>>>  I've always thought of science as a mechanism for pruning out
>>> guesses that don't work rather than a mechanism for finding the truth.
>
> Hmm, interesting...  That does fit with the idea of coming arbitrarily
> close to the truth without actually getting there.
>
>> Yes, agreed, but there's another essential ingredient: critical thinking.
>> The scientific method doesn't work if the would-be scientist doesn't
>> understand or use it.
>
> That nicely takes care of creation science...
>
Well no.

In the end conventional science versus creation science is about what
you find the most inconceivable - a Big Bang N billion years ago in
which a broken symmetry started time in the exact way it appears, or a
supernal Being who dreamed it all up a few thousand years ago and faked
it to *look like* it was N billion years old. Or whatever the current
figure is.

And those are not the only narratives that exist. And they are in the
end metaphysical. They can't be proved to be correct, only more or less
useful, in any given context.

Its not turtles all the way down, it's *models*.


--
“Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of
other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance"

    -  John K Galbraith

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