The Relationship Between Science and Religion

[AlchoPwn]

Maybe but you still seem to me to be assuming that that is what they should do mainly because you want them to. The people to whom you refer are individuals and each of them chooses their own areas to research. UFOs are just one area and there are already many people (a few groups being very well funded and employing scientists) collecting reports and searching for patterns in the anecdotes. But substantive, objectively measured or measurable data is still very, very hard to come in practice when it comes to Fortean phenomena (especially UFOs, one of my areas of special interest), and that's the key the difficulty at present.

Agreed. We run into the old problem of the French Academy saying "there are no rocks in the sky ergo rocks cannot fall from the sky" and thereby dismissing meteorites because they haven't personally seen them fall. Science has some problems measuring a phenomenon it can't easily explain or reproduce, which is unsurprising. Thus it becomes more a detective case than a laboratory investigation.

 

[Carl Grove]

Agreed. We run into the old problem of the French Academy saying "there are no rocks in the sky ergo rocks cannot fall from the sky" and thereby dismissing meteorites because they haven't personally seen them fall. Science has some problems measuring a phenomenon it can't easily explain or reproduce, which is unsurprising. Thus it becomes more a detective case than a laboratory investigation.

I think many disagreements of this kind happen because people are not differentiating between long established branches of science and attempts to establish a scientific approach to the study of phenomena that have previously been disregarded. In the initial stages of any science there are problems deciding what evidence to look for, assessing it, using an inductive approach to detect patterns in the evidence, etc. Out of this eventually comes the hypothetico-deductive stage, the establishment of specialisations, rival schools of thought, theory building and testing, publishing journals devoted to the new field (peer reviewed, as they say today), and founding university departments... You simply cannot apply the standards of the second stage to the necessarily chaotic first stage. Nobody ever demanded that the true pioneers of science apply to peer reviewed journals to publish their work. The journals did not yet exist. Detective work must necessarily precede the laboratory studies!

 

[INT21]

Carl grove,

..Nobody ever demanded that the true pioneers of science apply to peer reviewed journals to publish their work. The journals did not yet exist. Detective work must necessarily precede the laboratory studies! ..

Possibly not in the form of submitting their ideas to Nature.

But there were plenty of scientists who were following the latest experiments and trying to replicate and/or improve on the results.
Remember that Phlogiston went on for about 100 years before it was disproved.

And, as you allude to, first comes the hypothesis, then the theory, then the experiment to prove.

And often, then back to stage one; often with added 'where did we go wrong ?'

But you can't ask theologians for proof. There isn't any.

This must please them immensely.

INT21