MisterTinkles Wrote:Hmmm, for a minute there I thought you were making reference to my age....
....Until then, anything the "scientific community" says is fact, is in essence only a guess.
Right on the money, and putting scare quotes around scientific community impresses nobody. Science is and always will be provisional. First there are observations. Theories are made to account for those observations. Predictions are made based on these theories. Further observations are made. If the theory is confirmed, rinse and repeat until it isn't.
The history of science is littered with abandoned theories, Lamarckian evolution, phlogiston, luminiferous ether, miasma. All of them served their purpose by directing research to enable us to get a better view of what's going on. Having served their purpose they are replaced with our improved guess. This is what science does. Science is a method of discovery as well as a body of knowledge, both are in constant flux. Science nowhere and never claims to be the final word on any issue with which it is involved. If we took your advice and didn't abandon our best guesses we'd perhaps still be hanging on to the miasma theory of disease and saving huge sums of public money by not treating water and sewage. That money could be used to make cholera victims more comfortable in their final hours.
It is not an accident that, for instance, life expectancy has been increasing, particularly over the last century. Some of that has been down to increasing wealth and better nutrition. The wealth has resulted from better technology, ie the application of science. Increasing crop yields and improved husbandry have left us better fed. Medical discoveries have, for example, all but eradicated smallpox and made polio outbreaks a thing of the past. A broken leg now rarely results in amputation, diabetes is treatable, organ transplants save lives, cancer survival rates have increased. The list, while not endless, is very long indeed. None of the discoveries that enabled these things occurred outside the framework of observation-theory-further observation-modify theory.
There have been failures, malaria is still a massive killer, the aids virus is still without antidote or immunisation. Science may or may not deliver either but the discipline of making observations, formulating a best guess and pursuing observations based on it are going to get us there better than waiting for a happy accident to occur. The method doesn't even preclude the prospect of a happy accident. I won't be holding my breath, before the scientific method took hold we had many centuries where the happy accident or the revealed truth were the sources of our knowledge, centuries during which life was nasty brutish and short.
No other method of discovery or body of knowledge has made such a radical difference to life as we experience it. The advances we take for granted were not accidents but applications of the scientific method.
As to not being able to see things, can we see electrons? No we can't. Can we observe quantum events directly? No, we can't. Both these things are crucial to the technology that has enabled you to peddle your ignorance in a public place. I frankly don't know which is more depressing, the ignorance itself or the capacity that science has given you to flaunt it. Perhaps worse than either is the
willingness to flaunt it.
They say that age does not come alone, it is sad to see it have to carry such a burden of ignorance.