>-----Original Message-----
>From: SHinrichs9@aol.com [mailto:SHinrichs9@aol.com]
>Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2000 6:39 AM
>To: asa@calvin.edu
>Subject: RE: Rational Methodology for Evaluating Supernatural Claim
>>GM1 I have been in science for 30 years or so and have never
>heard of such a
> method.
>
>You claim you have never heard of it, but in your discussion you work with
>the PE idea. For example, you present examples where one had thought they
>proven a theory true, but turned out to be false when other
>theories not yet
>determined false turned out to be correct. Perhaps you do agree
>with me that
>PE is a valid logical concept for determining the truth about reality. You
>just wanted to point out that people still often make premature
>conclusions
>before they objectively rule out all the other possible
>hypothesis. I would
>certainly agree with this point.
I think you misunderstood what I said in other cases. Never have I said that if one falsifies all other ideas the idea left standing is true. Sherlock Holmes was wrong.
>>GM1 The problem is that if all known theories save one has been
>falsified,
>this is no guarantee that the remaining is correct. It also might
>be wrong
>and the case may fall into one of several possibilities:
>
>I did not claim all known theories except one falsified, but I claimed all
>possible theories except one falsified.
When I was in graduate school in the philosophy of Science, I learned that for any given set of facts there are an infinite number of hypotheses which will explain any set of facts. True, most of them are trivial, but there is still an infinitude of them. Given that there is an infinitude of theories, one can never achieve the state you so easily assume to exist.
>>GM1 4. Our minds very well might not be able to comprehend the
>true theory.
>This is becoming a worry among physicists trying to develop a theory of
>everything. When we begin to work with math of 10-11 dimensions
>and attempt
>to deal with non-linearities in those dimensions, we may never truly
>understand the full implications of what we have wrought.
>
>Fundamental physics involve evaluation of fields which are defined by
>continuous complicated mathematical functions. Certainly scientist
>have made
>great strides in rejecting false theories and getting closer to
>the correct
>one; however, it is difficult if not humanly impossible to
>determine all the
>possible hypotheses for Fundamental physics nonetheless reject all the
>possible but one.
A 1/r^2 field is not that complicated. It only becomes complicated when there are lots of such fields floating around.
glenn
see http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
for lots of creation/evolution information
anthropology/geology/paleontology/theology\
personal stories of struggle
>
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