[octothorp]

Originally Posted by Itse

Now that we're getting philosophical here, I actually thought of something else that Hume said that kind of relates to this (in my mind at least.)

Essentially, Hume stated, with decent backing arguments, that a rational mind never believes in miracles since there is always a more likely explanation. However, he left quite blatantly open that this doesn't mean that miracles couldn't happen. Which is, in a way, true, if you think of miracles as "stuff you'd never have thought of as possible".

Okay, for the purposes of this discussion, I'm going to tweak that slightly.
There's a logical problem in that definition in that if a miracle is something you believe is impossible, then to believe in a miracle is to believe in something that you believe is impossible, which would be a contradiction.

Maybe we can define a miracle as something that the general scientific community believes is impossible, or better yet, something which contradicts an existing law of science.

The problem with this logic is of course that even if miracles would happen, a person who is "rational" in the way Hume describes here would still disbelieve them, no matter how much the evidence mounted. Every single miracle is discounted, and thus every following miracle would be discounted, and so on.

Well, the rational scientist would not go into an experiment expecting a miracle, and if a miracle occured, they would immediately attempt to make it a non-miracle: check for errors in the experiment, check for reproducability, and as a last resort, rewrite the laws of science to allow for this new exception. The advantage that the non-rational scientist would have is that the rational scientist may not think of the experiment in the first place, since they would assume a result that simply supported existing knowledge. But the non-rational scientist would have the same obligation to check for errors and reproducability.

Obviously, this leads to two conclusions;

1) Purely rational minds don't make good scientists, since they would rather disbelieve things they previously thought as impossible, and thus the most amazing scientific breakthroughs would've propably never happened. From this follows the second conclusion:

Science needs both types: the people who come up with new theories (non-rational) and the people who try to debunk them (rational). A good scientist is never working to prove an existing theory right, they're always working to prove a theory wrong, even if it's their own. Good science isn't all about the breakthrough theories, a lot of it is about the dull diligence work. And if the non-rational thinker simply has a different prediction of the outcome of an experiment, that doesn't change the results.

2) For the advancement of science (and civilization and human happiness), we have to accept that occasionally "miracles" do happen.

Yeah, I don't have a problem with that statement.

(There's also a third conclusion which states that "rational" people end up as partisan bigots. But that's a different subject.)

Sure, different subject, but I'll take a quick shot at it. There are partisan bigots who shoot down any new theory, but there are also a lot of partisan bigots who have come up with 'miracle' theories and are too passionate about them to attempt to disprove them or listen to criticism.

With that in mind, replace "miracle" with "the universe blowing up".
Close enough I would say. Less trumpets.

Okay, except that the range of theories about what will happen is huge, and many of them are miraculous, according to my definition. The people who expect the universe to end and the people who expect a time loop and a lot of the people who have their little pet theories are all predicting miracles.

Which is why I don't laugh at people like Jolinar (joke as I may about the subject in general). They kind of only have to be right just once for it to matter

I'm not saying that we should never do anything that could theoretically blow up the universe. I just think worrying about it is indeed a valid point of view which can be reached through careful and informed thinking.

I've got no problem with people coming up with theories. The harder part of science is coming up with demonstrable proof, and that hasn't happened yet. It's one thing to predict a miracle, but science is about then taking these miracles and de-miracling them, applying scientific process.