Originally Posted by anthropic
Good discussion, jpsdad. I'm not real good at taking things on faith. Observational evidence either supports a proposition, or it doesn't.

In my way of thinking observational evidence falsifies a proposition or it doesn't. The difference is not subtle as gives truth while the other logically fallacious. The fallacy is called "Assuming the consequent".

If A & B yields C then C means A & B are true. Having worked with many models that yield C I have a good understanding as to why C doesn't support that A & B are true. All we can actually say is that A&B are not falsified because we observed C.

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Many things people believe are, in fact, false.

Perhaps it is most things. It's really better, for science anyway, to resist the temptation to believe and restrict everything to logical systems where all truth is conditioned to and within the logical system and where all we can know of it is whether an experimental observation falsifies it or not. If an experiment cannot be devised to falsify a theory or proposition, then it isn't science.

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I was trained from childhood to think skeptically, especially at stuff "everyone" knows is true, or because "science" says so.

A brief comment on the Big Bang. Roger Penrose & Stephen Hawking demonstrated that prior to the BB, neither space, time, matter, or energy existed. Thus, whatever caused the BB had to be spaceless, timeless, immaterial.

Perhaps you could explain what experiment they performed which result depends on assuming there was nothing prior to onset of universal expansion (at least then we would know it wasn't falsified by some predicted experimental result). They could never provide observational evidence of nothing so this would be the next best thing.

Even Penrose and Hawking have faith it would seem.


It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so - Will Rogers