• InputZero@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I’ve met scientists who say God exists and the universe is billions of years old. Their perspective is definitely a bit different. They see themselves as discoverers of God’s work but their academic work was just as valid as their atheist colleagues. Most often they were the first to criticize their church and continued to believe. Blew my mind.

    • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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      1 month ago

      Their academic work is only valid if it doesn’t incorporate their religion. Because faith has no value in science.

      • AccountMaker@slrpnk.net
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        1 month ago

        lol, actually, good science would be on the left side of the image, at least after giving an answer to a question. Good science will actually prove something, then give the answer, then have no reason to continue to find another answer for it (whatever the issue is.) If you are giving a different answer year after year (like say for the age of the earth), then aren’t you admitting that so far you haven’t known the answer?

        That’s not really the take of the modern philosophy of science. All modern schools of thought when it comes to science have the acceptance of falsehoods embedded into their nodels. I’ll give a few examples:

        Karl Popper famously stated that science cannot prove that anything is true, only that something is false. Thus, any scientific theory that’s still accepted is regarded as not yet being proven wrong. Science is just a cycle of giving theories, proving them wrong, giving new ones to account for the problem of the old one and so on, ever getting closer to the truth, but never arriving.

        Thomas Kuhn wrote about scientific paradigms, which are models of the field in question that every scientist uses (for example Aristotelian motion, which was surpassed by Newtonian mechanics, which were surpassed by Einstein’s relativity). During the period of “normal science”, scientists are using their established methods until they end up with too many problems they cannot resolve, at which point it is accepted that the paradigm cannot hold up, and a scientific revolution needs to bring forth a new paradigm, that is incomparable with the old one. Some knowledge is lost in this process, but we move on until the next crisis.

        Paul Feyerabend wrote about countet-induction, which prevents science becoming a dogma. An example he gives is Copernicus going completely against the science of his time with his heliocentric system. The Ptolemaic system was as cutting edge science back then as quantum mechanics is today.

        All in all, findings being continuously disproven and replaced by new ones is not bad science, it is science. Achieving actual, “true”, positive knowledge of the world, documenting it and saying “that’s it, we solved this problem, we’re done” is not something modern science event attempts at.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        1 month ago

        We pretty confident in the age of the Earth and have been pretty confident in its age for quite some time if you asked 20 scientists they will all give you pretty much the same answer. I don’t know where you’re getting this belief that the age of the Earth is in debate.

          • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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            1 month ago

            I cannot speak to the quality of the documentaries you’re watching since you don’t actually list them.

            But I can assure you we are extremely confident we know the age of the Earth. In fact we have known the age of the Earth with high confidence longer than we’ve known age of the universe that contains it.

            The ages of various life forms on the earth are much more nebulous but the age of the actual rock that makes the planet up, is known.

                  • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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                    1 month ago

                    Oh well if you’re “pretty sure” then I won’t argue with you.

                    After all, you have a feeling on the subject. Don’t bother to look it up or anything. Remaining deliberately uninformed is so much more appealing doing a quick Google search.