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With apologies to the OP for taking the thread further off-topic, and to Dani because whilst she used the expression this posting isn't directed at nor intended to malign her, it was just her words that drew me to post further...
"Science can't explain everything" is a claim made ever more regularly in our "post-truth" world. So who gets to decide what exactly "science can't explain"? When someone finds a particular belief they hold dear challenged, they might think it a justifiable response, but what about everyone else who wants to make some different claim about the way the universe works?
Should we also accept the word of someone, or even many someones, who make all kinds of random claims about the world simply because "science can't explain everything"? Or do we need to have some process to evaluate what claims are reasonable for science not to be able to explain and what are just some nutjob mouthing off? How might such a process work? Might it begin by examining the claims to see if other people make the same observations? And then to investigate possible causes of such observations and test whether they can sometimes or even always lead to such observations? And perhaps then to test if those observations might be repeated by completely independent groups of people? Obviously people could be biased to believe or disbelieve the claim and that might distort the conclusions they make, so there'd need to be some way to cancel that effect out, too.
That's a bit wordy, so perhaps we should give the process a shorter name. But hang on, we already have. It's called "The Scientific Method".
James
"Science can't explain everything" is a claim made ever more regularly in our "post-truth" world. So who gets to decide what exactly "science can't explain"? When someone finds a particular belief they hold dear challenged, they might think it a justifiable response, but what about everyone else who wants to make some different claim about the way the universe works?
Should we also accept the word of someone, or even many someones, who make all kinds of random claims about the world simply because "science can't explain everything"? Or do we need to have some process to evaluate what claims are reasonable for science not to be able to explain and what are just some nutjob mouthing off? How might such a process work? Might it begin by examining the claims to see if other people make the same observations? And then to investigate possible causes of such observations and test whether they can sometimes or even always lead to such observations? And perhaps then to test if those observations might be repeated by completely independent groups of people? Obviously people could be biased to believe or disbelieve the claim and that might distort the conclusions they make, so there'd need to be some way to cancel that effect out, too.
That's a bit wordy, so perhaps we should give the process a shorter name. But hang on, we already have. It's called "The Scientific Method".
James