Vatican miracle claims are like the US national debt. You can call them "always contingent on future scientific discovery" but that's just fancy speak for "they are writing IOUs that will never cash out". This god of the gaps placeholder gambit has been played for centuries though. It isn't losing popularity and I doubt it ever will because the more we know, the more we know we don't know. Miracle claims are always the first to pitch a tent over the boundary line of our knowledge and ignorance. Until science pushes them further and further out into the endless ignorance frontier. Miracle claims are always possible, never necessary.
It has always been acknowledged that there are different kinds of miracles. Some are fully impossible on naturalism, whereas others (most) are a kind of drawing out beyond the limits of natural science. This doesn't mean that the latter aren't miracles. For example, if a holy person heals someone of cancer, and science later discovers how to fight cancer with drugs and radiation, it doesn't follow that the healing was not miraculous. The mode of miracles and the mode of science are usually legitimately different, even when they achieve the same end.
This quote should probably go in my signature, it really is too good.
Haha
Now, to say that Science proceeds by finding evidence for hypotheses? Well this premise is just rude. A meme that infects our discourse year after year as if Karl Popper never existed. Science works by generating experimental evidence against things, not for things. Falsification not verification.
I have not read Deutsch but I have read a small bit of Popper. I think your claim here is just mistaken. Even if we want to say that long-term scientific progress proceeds by way of falsification, theories are still proposed on the basis of evidence (Christopher Southgate gives some minor arguments on the importance of a more robust scientific imagination that synthesizes evidence and produces higher-quality theories in his book on Glory).
To take a simple example, when Darwin was observing birds in Chile and the Galapagos, he was collecting evidence which he synthesized into his theory about descent. Proportional evidence led to his hypothesis and caused him to write a book that changed the way scientists think about variation among and between species. Without that evidence there would be no theory. So the claim that science is about falsification and not verification is quite strange. Falsification always presupposes verification.
- Humans are fallible. Always have been, always will be, even after the singularity and we shuffle off this mortal coil.
- We do not directly observe anything. What you see/hear/touch is an imperfect model emerging from electrical signals in the brain.
- Data does not interpret itself. All observation is "theory-laden".
- Knowledge cannot come from revelation, observation, induction (there is no such thing), verification, feelings, innate beliefs, or even pure logic. These all assume some epistemological bedrock that is essentially infallible. There is no bedrock.
- Knowledge can only progress by guesswork and error correction, what Popper calls conjecture and refutation. Again, Falsification not Verification. Note the similarity to evolution by natural selection.
- Even our best theories are filled with misconceptions. There is no escape from our ever present fallibility.
- But by correcting some of our misconceptions we can make progress. We can become “Less Wrong”.
- How do we correct our errors? For Popper the refutation step involves testing competing theories’ against each other. Whatever survives is our best current explanation, until it isn’t.
I could probably sign on to 1, 3, 6, 7, and 8. 5 is a common modern misunderstanding of knowledge. The others do not hold much weight in my opinion (2 and 4).
David Deutsch’s contributions are several. First to notice that our constant fallibility ironically entails the potential for infinite progress. Anything that isn’t prohibited by the laws of nature is possible given the right knowledge. Second to show that explanation precedes prediction and experiment, and offer a criterion for sifting “good” explanations from “bad” ones. Good explanations must be hard-to-vary, easy-to-vary explanations are Bad. And Bad explanations can be ruled out before even testing. Some miracle claims are actually testable (Premise 2 is false), but can be ruled out because they are easily variable.
What do "easy-to-vary" and "hard-to-vary" mean, and what makes them good or bad? Is it just to say that more generalized theories are more useful?
Where I differ from Popper and Deutsch is that unknown-knowns play a bigger role that either of them give credit to.
I have heard the term used in different contexts, such as economics and politics. What do you mean by "unknown-knowns"?
So there’s a rough map of the terrain. Do I expect any of these ideas to persuade you that Premise 1 is false? Of course not, only a fool would enter a public forum expecting to persuade anyone of anything by reason. But if you spot any glaring errors in my very fallible guesswork, feel free to offer a refutation. And maybe we will make some progress.
Fair enough.
