by alecto » December 19th, 2007, 9:27 pm
The scientific method is, in a nutshell: if you want to find out of something is true, test it.
This is what we do in virtually every everyday venture. If we want to find if the clothes truly fit, we try them on. If we want to see if its true that we'll like dish X, we taste it. In the courtroom, we can't literally do this very often. It's difficult to test the past. But we try to get as close to it as possible. We do not accept heresay if possible, but try to find "hard evidence." Some say the scientific method is recent, but you can find stories of people using it in ancient writings. But very often, when discussing nature, philsophers such as Aristotle are usually discussing what other people have said, not what they found out. So we say science is new, but it really isn't. We just apply the way we always shopped for shoes to things like natural philosophy now. And it works really really well.
Now scientists have picked up a very big gun, so to speak, and shot themselves in their own foot, by going off and saying something like this: "science seeks facts, not truth." That's hogwash. The kind of thing scientists are trying to figure out is what nearly every person is trying to figure out if he or she asks a question like "is X true." The only exception, and it's the one that pissed Dawkins off so much, is religion. In religion, we distinguish two sorts of things, facts and truth. Scientists bought into that for some reason. It's not the way we use the word - except within religion - so scientists have got themselves within religion even while saying what they do is separate.
In the days of the Church Fathers, religion was thought about more scientifically. Like in the courtroom, you couldn't get at some of the things you might want to test, but you would do "thought experiments" like this: compare Jewish religion to Greek religion and ask yourself: what kind of world would these gods really make? Which do we live in? It worked quite well, in the long run, to convince people that tis world could not have been built by anything like what the Greek gods are described as being.
Sentio ergo est.