Kairos
Senior Member
- Messages
- 1,103
I think he is still mixing philosophy with science.
The point of relativity is not that gravity is merely a kind of acceleration in essence, but that in a practical sense they work the same. The model treats them the same and it works.
He's arguing almost from an Aristotelian epistemological position regarding the essence of things.
It may very well be the case that there does exist a difference between the two that makes a real distinction with respect to predictions of observed phenomena. But if he cannot show his idea makes any differences in predictions of observed phenomena, then the idea won't get traction just on the basis of parsimony alone.
Science is not really about truth as the new atheists wish to make it. It's about making models that accurately predict our observations. If we observe phenomena that contradict a model, or the model cannot otherwise explain it, THEN we go about trying to come up with a new model.
Nobody doing science seriously should actually believe the model is truth. It's just the best and most parsimonious predictive model he has available. Think of scientific theories more like a collection of tools. We might want better tools in the future. One should not consider any one tool as the "truth". It's an approximation of it. Really a map of it.
Thus, he needs to show where the existing tool fails to make predictions of observed phenomena and how his will account for this discrepancy.
The point of relativity is not that gravity is merely a kind of acceleration in essence, but that in a practical sense they work the same. The model treats them the same and it works.
He's arguing almost from an Aristotelian epistemological position regarding the essence of things.
It may very well be the case that there does exist a difference between the two that makes a real distinction with respect to predictions of observed phenomena. But if he cannot show his idea makes any differences in predictions of observed phenomena, then the idea won't get traction just on the basis of parsimony alone.
Science is not really about truth as the new atheists wish to make it. It's about making models that accurately predict our observations. If we observe phenomena that contradict a model, or the model cannot otherwise explain it, THEN we go about trying to come up with a new model.
Nobody doing science seriously should actually believe the model is truth. It's just the best and most parsimonious predictive model he has available. Think of scientific theories more like a collection of tools. We might want better tools in the future. One should not consider any one tool as the "truth". It's an approximation of it. Really a map of it.
Thus, he needs to show where the existing tool fails to make predictions of observed phenomena and how his will account for this discrepancy.
