homunculus
11th September 2003, 06:30 AM
Every explanation - in or outside of science - is an attempt to account for certain observations, or states of affairs, which seem to conflict with some other, more established theory, or otherwise defies our expectations about what, given our current understanding, should be the case. Where there is a need for explanation, there is always some theoretical problem lacking a solution.
Our problem may be quite mundane, and not require any serious revision of our knowledge, or then it may be highly abstruse and technical, and only recogniseable at all from the perspective of some particularly difficult theory. Or perhaps answering our problem involves radically re-thinking everything we took to be the case.
Whatever the situation, our explanation must meet certain general criteria (which in everyday life, most of us seem able to recognise). It is no good, for example, if our account muddies the problem even further, introducing a host of additional complications, and embroiling us in many new problems we never had before. Our car may indeed have broken down because of some elaborate plot involving all our neighbours, a length of chicken wire, and a boiled sweet. But given the facts as we have them, is this really the simplest explanation?
It is also no good if our theory just shifts the problem elsewhere. If our task is to explain how life might have arisen from inanimate matter, we may well find our answer in clay lattices, primordial soup etc. But to announce that Earth was seeded by Martian bacteria, simply exports our problem to a different environment (this is true wether or not life began on Mars).
It seems to me that all "supernatural" and religious explanations suffer from these kinds of defects. It may be true that nobody knows for sure how the universe came into being (or, that it has not been settled to the satisfaction of every authority) but invoking an invisible, undefineable, supernatural "creator" does nothing to improve matters. Unless it can be explained what kind of entity this "creator" is, and how the "creation" was achieved, we have only replaced one mystery with another, as well as shifted the problem (because who or what, then, created the creator?)
It is my view that our intuitions about what consitutes a "quack" theory, or "woo-woo", have more to do with their being vague, messy, and unhelpful explanations, than any inherent "untestability" or "unfalsifiability". Nobody can test string theory, for example, but it is taken seriously by many scientists, because it has such great explanatory power (explanation being the point of the whole enterprise).
Thoughts?
Paul.
Our problem may be quite mundane, and not require any serious revision of our knowledge, or then it may be highly abstruse and technical, and only recogniseable at all from the perspective of some particularly difficult theory. Or perhaps answering our problem involves radically re-thinking everything we took to be the case.
Whatever the situation, our explanation must meet certain general criteria (which in everyday life, most of us seem able to recognise). It is no good, for example, if our account muddies the problem even further, introducing a host of additional complications, and embroiling us in many new problems we never had before. Our car may indeed have broken down because of some elaborate plot involving all our neighbours, a length of chicken wire, and a boiled sweet. But given the facts as we have them, is this really the simplest explanation?
It is also no good if our theory just shifts the problem elsewhere. If our task is to explain how life might have arisen from inanimate matter, we may well find our answer in clay lattices, primordial soup etc. But to announce that Earth was seeded by Martian bacteria, simply exports our problem to a different environment (this is true wether or not life began on Mars).
It seems to me that all "supernatural" and religious explanations suffer from these kinds of defects. It may be true that nobody knows for sure how the universe came into being (or, that it has not been settled to the satisfaction of every authority) but invoking an invisible, undefineable, supernatural "creator" does nothing to improve matters. Unless it can be explained what kind of entity this "creator" is, and how the "creation" was achieved, we have only replaced one mystery with another, as well as shifted the problem (because who or what, then, created the creator?)
It is my view that our intuitions about what consitutes a "quack" theory, or "woo-woo", have more to do with their being vague, messy, and unhelpful explanations, than any inherent "untestability" or "unfalsifiability". Nobody can test string theory, for example, but it is taken seriously by many scientists, because it has such great explanatory power (explanation being the point of the whole enterprise).
Thoughts?
Paul.