No. This is incorrect. You're talking about model accuracy and observation accuracy.
I am talking about something far more fundamental. Using axiomatic logic and probability, you cannot prove anything in science. Even with observations that are 100% accurate with 100% precision. This literally has fundamental consequences on our interpretation of reality as we know it and has affected out perception of reality and our science as well.
This occurs because at any point in time a new observation can be made that falsifies a theory. Let's say you have a hypothesis that all zebras have stripes. You can observe 500 zebras with 100% accuracy and see that all of those zebras have stripes. But at any point in time in the future you can happen upon a hidden island that has 2 million zebras on it that has spots instead. 500 observations is minuscule in the face of 2 million and it literally renders your initial hypothesis ludicrous. Zebras are creatures that are more likely to have spots then stripes is the complete U-turn conclusion based off of new observations.
Keep in mind the new conclusion occurred regardless of how methodological and accurate your initial observations were. The accuracy of the observation is Completely and utterly irrelevant. Because at any point in time I can encounter another new island with 1 billion zebras that has stripes rendering my second conclusion completely wrong, again.
This is the fundamental flaw of science. It is far more fundamental then limited accuracy in observational measurements.
For example take newtons laws of motion. There is no 99% right or wrong on that model. Assuming that our observations are accurate, Newtons laws of motion are 100% percent wrong.
Yes they may be accurate numerically to a certain extent but the theory has ultimately been falsified and we now know relativity is a more accurate description. However, keep in mind that even relativity is not "proven" it can Never be proven and it will always be open for a complete reversal the same way Newtonian motion was.
In fact Newtons laws of motion is the perfect example. It was the ultimate example of scientific verification. All experiments pointed to the theory being completely accurate, to disbelieve the science was to disbelieve reality. It was at the time equivalent to disbelieving evolution.
This is the fundamental flaw with science. Nothing can ever truly be proven. And everything even the fundamental pillars of reality we rely on today from Newtons laws to evolution can never actually be proven to be true, and is always open for a complete rewrite.
This is the exact reason as to why people can pick and choose the reality they believe in, whether it be Christianity or evolution. Neither can in actuality be proven, nothing has and nothing ever will.
You seem to be very strong down the nihilism philosophy. I have a view point that nihilism isn't a useful philosophy & doesn't yield any particularly meaningful insights that help you find success in this world. It's very much, at least to me, of the same vein as the Omphalos hypothesis
(also known as Last Thursdayism by atheists such as myself) which says "Sure sure. You've got all these fancy theories. But how do you *know* the universe wasn't created in its current state Last Thursday & so all your measurements are meaningless?".
Worrying about an epistemological definition of "truth" that is different from the scientifically one is equally unhelpful. Scientific philosophy & the inquiry stemming from that actually yields results in any field you look into & just building on that. Worrying about a higher order definition of truth and certainty that only exists in your own mind (since no two people will agree) is irrelevant & unhelpful. Medicine has come a very long way from where it was & our understanding of it is drastically better than it was. Is it perfect? No. Is it infallible? No. Does it matter? Not really because at the end of the day it's infinitely better than where we started & continuing along this path will continue to yield results over time.
> In fact Newtons laws of motion is the perfect example. It was the ultimate example of scientific verification. All experiments pointed to the theory being completely accurate, to disbelieve the science was to disbelieve reality. It was at the time equivalent to disbelieving evolution.
I'm always fascinated by people who claim that Einstein's theory of relativity somehow undermines the bedrock of scientific inquiry when it's 100% the thing that supports it. Newton's theories weren't wrong. They were 100% correct for the environments we were testing them in. Like the all the equations behind the theory of relativity, if you turn down the speed & mass variables to every day human values, they literally turn into the same classical Newtonian mechanics equations. The *only* instance that you should be questioning the scientific validity of a field is when there's competing theories & the experiments themselves don't really help make decisions. Like dietary science. That's a field that constantly produces contradicting results. There's definitely some good advice but it's mostly hokum except for the parts that actually intersect with medical research or have really wide studies done because of the problems of limited observations. Same with pop psychology & other human-centered inquiries that don't have external sensors against which to measure results & large sample sizes to deal with the variation. Non-physical inquiries suffer very few of these problems & are easier to experiment with.
If it helps you, the scientific method of inquiry of in some ways is directly supported as a fundamental tenet of mathematics (via the fields of probability/calculus). If you sample an underlying distribution enough times with a random enough sample (no bias that's causing you to overlook things), the more the samples match your estimate of the distribution, the less likely it is that your estimate and reality diverge. That resolves, at least for me, the philosophical conundrum of "what is truth" and "have you really done enough measurements". For religious arguments, your form of argument is "the God of the gaps" or "God of the cracks". If you just focus on a crack, all you can see is all that empty space & not the bridge that the crack is a non-critical part of. Even science's philosophy is underpinned by a mathematical truth & our challenges sticking to it are our own failures, not those of science. I recognize this sounds like religion, but the difference is:
* Falsifiability. Good scientists will very quickly discourage any attempt at scientific inquiry of anything that can't be disproven through experimentation.
* Free sharing of knowledge. We're not as great here because of the economic realities of our society, but certainly better than religion organizations that tend to have more of their documentation in private vaults. That being said, this is the most fair point of criticism against scientific inquiry for me & the one where today's scientific industry gets closest to religion.
* Consistency of conclusions. It doesn't matter if a discovery fails to take hold. Over time the same thing gets rediscovered eventually. Like Calculus being simultaneously invented by Newton & Leibniz. Good ideas just have their time & inevitability comes from a build up of knowledge. Religions don't really share this property. Neither does philosophy which just has a bunch of models & no way to model/investigate them. Philosophy is useful as a hypothesis generation machine or maybe as a way to examine how humans can improve the scientific field. That's about it & we need to be quick to discard it when science starts providing answers.
* Belief or lack of it doesn't matter. Science is about making predictions. If the predictions are based on faulty science, they'll not hold up over time. If the predictions do hold up, then they're more likely to be right. Probability is where this gets tricky, especially so when polling human sentiments. That is walking a razor's edge.
Still, science is the only philosophy that's actually yielded tangible results consistently over any period of time. Religion & other philosophies have not.
> You seem to be very strong down the nihilism philosophy. I have a view point that nihilism isn't a useful philosophy & doesn't yield any particularly meaningful insights that help you find success in this world. It's very much, at least to me, of the same vein as the Omphalos hypothesis (also known as Last Thursdayism by atheists such as myself) which says "Sure sure. You've got all these fancy theories. But how do you know the universe wasn't created in its current state Last Thursday & so all your measurements are meaningless?".
What I'm talking about isn't a philosophy. This is the fundamental tenet as illustrated by academia. I'm not pulling this out of my ass. This is what educated scientists understand about science. If you don't know this you literally don't know what you're talking about. I am not arguing my opinion here, I am arguing the academic definition of science.
To prove it to you I'll literally quote Einstein:
"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong."
If you don't understand why he said the above quote. You don't understand science in the same way a physicist or a scientist understands science. In fact the above was said in reference to Einsteins and newtons theories.
What einstien is basically saying is this. Science can never prove anything to be correct. It can ONLY falsify things.
>I'm always fascinated by people who claim that Einstein's theory of relativity somehow undermines the bedrock of scientific inquiry when it's 100% the thing that supports it. Newton's theories weren't wrong. They were 100% correct for the environments we were testing them in.
Your fascinated at the entire academic definition of science being different from your own personal definition? You're misunderstanding of science is the real enigma here.
Nothing is undermined. I'm not against science I am simply elucidating what science is to you in the sense that science can never prove anything to be true. Science can ONLY falsify things. It is a very limited tool, but it is also the only tool we have.
I'm an atheist like you, I get where your coming from. But you have not explored science deep enough. Look deeper into this as you are not understanding what is going on here. I am not arguing for religion or creationism or any of that BS as "valid" I am simply stating a fundamental well known flaw with science that is known by all people who know the technical definition of science.
Additionally, Newtons theory is 100% wrong in every environment. It only appears to be correct given limited accuracy of tooling. When you increase the accuracy of the observation the environment is irrelevant, it is always wrong.
>If it helps you, the scientific method of inquiry of in some ways is directly supported as a fundamental tenet of mathematics via calculus.
This is highly highly misguided. Logic and Science are completely separate. This is well known among people who understand the concept.
Logic is a game with rules axioms and a well understood domain. We create the rules and universe and therefore we're able to prove things within that universe.
Science is not the same. It is not an axiomatic game created by us. Science is the consequence of applying certain assumptions to a universe we did not create but only participate in.
We assume two things that are true in science. We assume logic is true. We assume rules like induction will always work even though we have no means of verifying it will work. We also assume probability works. We assume rolling a six sided dice will produce a certain outcome based off of probability and we again currently have no way of verify why or how this occurs. We just assume it.
Based off of these two assumptions we can create the scientific method. But this method is limited as it can only axiomatically falsify things. We can never prove anything to be true with science. This occurs, again because the domain of the real world is not limited like it is in our logical games of math. At any point in time the domain can change, shift and we can encounter a new unexpected observation that can change the entire arena.
Again, this isn't some BS I'm pulling out of my ass. This is science as Feynman and Einstein understood it. You lack understanding and I suggest you read up on the notion of what "proof" and science is.
Proof is only relevant in maths and logic, it is irrelevant in science and therefore reality as we know it. Science is the best tool we have but it is highly highly limited in the sense that it can never actually prove anything.
What ends up happening is science at best produces conclusions in the form of "We think this is true because our repeated attempts to falsify this hypothesis have failed." It can never produce anything definitive.
I am talking about something far more fundamental. Using axiomatic logic and probability, you cannot prove anything in science. Even with observations that are 100% accurate with 100% precision. This literally has fundamental consequences on our interpretation of reality as we know it and has affected out perception of reality and our science as well.
This occurs because at any point in time a new observation can be made that falsifies a theory. Let's say you have a hypothesis that all zebras have stripes. You can observe 500 zebras with 100% accuracy and see that all of those zebras have stripes. But at any point in time in the future you can happen upon a hidden island that has 2 million zebras on it that has spots instead. 500 observations is minuscule in the face of 2 million and it literally renders your initial hypothesis ludicrous. Zebras are creatures that are more likely to have spots then stripes is the complete U-turn conclusion based off of new observations.
Keep in mind the new conclusion occurred regardless of how methodological and accurate your initial observations were. The accuracy of the observation is Completely and utterly irrelevant. Because at any point in time I can encounter another new island with 1 billion zebras that has stripes rendering my second conclusion completely wrong, again.
This is the fundamental flaw of science. It is far more fundamental then limited accuracy in observational measurements.
For example take newtons laws of motion. There is no 99% right or wrong on that model. Assuming that our observations are accurate, Newtons laws of motion are 100% percent wrong.
Yes they may be accurate numerically to a certain extent but the theory has ultimately been falsified and we now know relativity is a more accurate description. However, keep in mind that even relativity is not "proven" it can Never be proven and it will always be open for a complete reversal the same way Newtonian motion was.
In fact Newtons laws of motion is the perfect example. It was the ultimate example of scientific verification. All experiments pointed to the theory being completely accurate, to disbelieve the science was to disbelieve reality. It was at the time equivalent to disbelieving evolution.
This is the fundamental flaw with science. Nothing can ever truly be proven. And everything even the fundamental pillars of reality we rely on today from Newtons laws to evolution can never actually be proven to be true, and is always open for a complete rewrite.
This is the exact reason as to why people can pick and choose the reality they believe in, whether it be Christianity or evolution. Neither can in actuality be proven, nothing has and nothing ever will.