[Osx-nutters] The separation of church and state.

[David Cake]

At 3:49 PM +1100 4/12/07, Anthony Morton wrote:
>  >> 'The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has stated that "intelligent
>>>  design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin
>>>  of life" are not science because they cannot be tested by experiment,
>>>  do not generate any predictions, and propose no new hypotheses of
>>>  their own.'
>>>
>>>  The problem I have with that is that it leaves out astronomy, huge
>>>  swaths of biology, lots of the human sciences and a lot of physics
>>>  since string theory came along.
>
>>  How do you figure it leaves out any of that stuff?
>>  All of those have predictive aspects and propose many new hypotheses.
>
>They do, but there's also whole branches of astronomy, biology and
>other sciences that come down to just cataloguing observations of
>what's out there, and this is still considered to be a legitimate part
>of science, even though there are no experiments, no predictions and no
>hypotheses.

	'Part of' being the operative phrase. Modern science is a big 
complex beast, and spends a lot of time building tools (both physical 
ones like geiger counters, dna sequencers, and hadron 
super-colliders, and purely intellectual ones like taxonomies, 
methods of mathematical analysis, and indexes). Time spent working on 
the processes that eventually, one day, will facilitate testing 
hypotheses etc is still science.

	Also, this sort of analysis is why Karl Poppers philosophy of 
science isn't that useful in practice. Sure, his idea of falsifiable 
hypotheses is quite useful for pointing out things that clearly 
aren't science, but it doesn't do a particularly good job of clearly 
explaining what IS, and what scientists to all day.

>
>Really this is the old distinction between 'natural history' and
>'natural philosophy': one was about observation and recording, the
>other about hypothesis and experiment.  We now use the term 'science'
>to cover both, but naive descriptions of 'the scientific method' can
>exclude much of what we consider to be science.
'
	Indeed.
	Cheers
		David