-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Why is the theory of evolution...still considered a theory?
- Thread starter Deidre
- Start date
psychoslice
Veteran Member
And where did this spirit come from, someone else;s snap of a finger ?.
Thief
Rogue Theologian
psychoslice
Veteran Member
Na, you have no proof for that, so no use continuing this discussion.
Thief
Rogue Theologian
I shall continue without you
psychoslice
Veteran Member
Thank you, and good luck with that.
This was what I was responding to:
None of these are laws. Also, what equations of Feynman are even supposed to have something like the status of Einstein's field equations or the wave equation? He didn't develop QED, he helped develop a mathematical trick that he described as not legitimate to force perturbation expansions required to describe any real calculations in QED or QFTs more generally to be finite.
True, but not the whole truth. The "laws" that are familiar weren't intended to be limited to domains or interpreted in the way field theories are today (i.e., as "effective field theories" rather than accurate descriptions of anything fundamental). They turned out to be so, and thus as the number of different scientific fields increases along with our understanding of the complexity of almost all domains, the language of classical natural philosophy in which descriptions extrapolated from experiments were codified into general "laws" has proven to be fundamentally inadequate, flawed, and reflective of a bygone age.
However, the manner in which we scientists actually communicate and the terminology we use as well as the ways in which terms like "law", "theory", etc., show up in technical literature has not, in general, been communicated adequately to the public nor been understood by pre-college "science" instructors/teachers (and even in undergraduate level textbooks, research in scientific education shows that there exists a rather problematic divide between the manner in which scientific practice and the nature of science (NoS) described and the actual practice of working researchers/scientists.
Last edited:
No. The "law" of the conservation of energy is violated all the time, the "law of gravity" isn't even really sensible in modern physics (particle physics doesn't consider gravitation at all and in our best theory of this "force" it is actually not a force but the action of matter on the geometric structure of the spacetime manifold; quantum loop gravity is perhaps better developed than string theory nonsense, but as neither concern the "law of gravity" and special relativity precludes this "law" from existence, this doesn't matter), etc. Also, if laws were irrefutable they wouldn't be scientific. Although Popper wasn't entirely correct in demanding that falsifiability be the distinguishing criterion and fundamental characteristic of the sciences, it is a vital component. Anything which cannot even in principle be refuted by scientific investigation lies outside of the scientific endeavor.
Proof is for mathematics. The scientific endeavor is empirical, which means we must at least trust in assumptions like "there exists a world outside my mind". I can't prove that I'm not in the Matrix, but any experimental research I conduct or serve as a consultant for involves that assumption. Basically, theory often is as close to proof as it is possible to have in the real world rather than mathematical spaces. I can prove things about operators acting on vectors in Hilbert spaces, I can prove the multilinearity of tensors in geometric formulations of gauge theories, etc. I can't prove that our use of these formalizations of scientific theories correspond to reality. That's because I can't even prove that there exists a reality beyond my own consciousness. But nobody lives as if the inability to prove things about any objective reality means that we can't speak confidently about such a reality (or they wouldn't eat, drink, etc.).
Ok. Let's limit ourselves to the field equation and the wave equation. I have only covered half of the graduate textbook of QED yet, so will not argue the matter.
In what world did the ideal gas law PV=nRT was considered universally applicable to all things? Just because laws of fundamental physics often appeared to be universal, does not mean laws in general was invariably considered thus. The laws of thermodynamics were first thought to be fairly restricted until the relationship with fundamental physics through the great works of Boltzmann was found. Here is another, called the Beer-Lambert law that tells how light is absorbed in a media (very useful in the physics of stellar chromatography and laser sciences.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer–Lambert_law
There is significant confusion between laws as understood in science and "laws of nature" as concept in philosophy. Scientists who do not know philosophy and Philosophers who do not know science wrongly believe that they are the same thing.
Which field equation? The Klein-Gordan? Any of those from non-relativistic quantum field theories? Or Einstein's field equation (which becomes a system of equations when the tensor is expanded)?
You're asking why a modern formulation of a modern way of referring to a "law" that couldn't even be understood as it is now:
"Boyle claimed to have formulated and tested the gas law for pressures over one atmosphere, and attributes to Townley the extrapolation of the law to lower pressures. This does not make modern sense, but in the 1650’s there were even special names for these two domains. Boyle had a model of atoms of air as springs, and a spring can be compressed and dilated; and Boyle’s assumed that the zero point between dilation and compression obtains under the pressure of exactly one atmosphere." (emphasis added)
Agassi, J. (2008). Science and its history: A reassessment of the historiography of science (Vol. 253). Springer.
The ideal gas law is, by its modern formulation (i.e., that it is a "law" which applies to an ideal that never exists) is necessarily vacuous, empty, and incoherent if understood as anything remotely resembling a "law" (it is a law that applies to systems that cannot exist). It was not developed to be so vacuous, but rather later reconstructions construed it in more appropriate and pragmatic terms.
They were by physicists of the time in most cases. Laplace is an excellent example, as is Euler, Einstein (who spent most of his life defending the first ever published scientific model of a "reality" criterion that turned out to be false), Bohr, etc. Recall Pope's description of Newton as the light of understanding of biblical proportions, or Laplace's declaration that Newtonian physics was so accurate an intellect with sufficient resources could exactly model the entirety of the past and future of all things, or Kelvin's declaration that there were but two clouds to be removed from our absolute understanding of fundamental physics, or von Jolly's advice to Planck to go into another field because physics was basically over with.
You are being anachronistic.
The laws of thermodynamics were thought to be restricted because the scientific community at large vehemently objected to the idea that anything fundamental could be said of a statistical mechanics. Boltzmann committed suicide during a time in which many of his contemporaries regarded his views on the foundational nature of statistical thermodynamics to be outright heresy. On this and statistical mechanics and thermodynamics more generally, see e.g.,
Cercignani, C. (1998). Ludwig Boltzmann: the man who trusted atoms. Oxford University Press.
Emch, G. G., & Liu, C. (2013). The logic of thermostatistical physics. Springer.
Hemmo, M., & Shenker, O. R. (2012). The road to Maxwell's Demon: Conceptual foundations of statistical mechanics. Cambridge University Press.
Which "laws" remain in scientific discourse are largely irrelevant: laws are not accorded the status of actual "laws" but reflect the kind of understanding and interpretation you described earlier. They are limited to domains. This is a principle reason for the decline or simple non-usage of the term in the technical literature and the reason that most of the remaining usage of the term applies to "laws" that are wrong.
Yes. But this is due to the development of a philosophy and history of science in which the usage of the term is already anachronistic (a retrospective account).
psychoslice
Veteran Member
Yes so true, and a hell of lot better than religion would have us to believe.
Ouroboros
Coincidentia oppositorum
But it says, "God is light; in him there is no darkness at all." 1 John 1:5
So was light preexisting within God or did God create light to become him? What came first? God as light or light created?
Another note: within the philosophy of science we find an even more radical criticism of any notion of "laws" in science or nature in an influential work (and those of the many who have followed in its author's tradition) How the Laws of Physics Lie. Indeed, your "effective theory" approach in which what you seem to wish to call "laws" (even if, like the wave equation which requires at least something like Born's postulate to be interpreted, as even in consistent histories and decoherence approaches the outcomes of measurements are probabilistic and the only thing that such approaches can tell us is that we observed what we did and, having done so, couldn't probabilistically have done otherwise) is thoroughly modern, and do in at least some small part to Cartwright's influence, although one can certainly find works in both the physics and philosophy of science literature in which fundamental theories are considered to be domain limited (although your use of the term "law" is rather unique, as limited/effective domain interpretations of theories that are considered "correct" in some sense because of their efficacy in their domains in general eschews such terminology).
Help me out. Which textbook? It will allow me to better understand where you are coming from.
I was talking about Einstein's field equation. Heck, I am happy with classical field equations (like that of Maxwell) as well. As long you have a set of equations that have a reasonably large domain of applicability in a field of science and tells you the level of its accuracy and the amount of error one would expect as one moves away from that domain, they, for me are laws. Welcome to yet another of these limited domain applicability laws, the Stefan Boltzman law:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan–Boltzmann_law
And of course Hooke's law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooke's_law
Another famous law in reactive chemistry is the Arrhenius equation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrhenius_equation
Or Coulomb's law of electrostatics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coulomb's_law
The thing is, laws have had varying domains of applicability while some having claim to greater domains and some lesser.
So what? The ideal gas law is a relationship between observable quantities in a gas which holds with excellent accuracy over large domains of the gas phase irrespective of the changing underlying models of why it works. Its a law and is treated and understood as a law in the entire physics and chemistry community. Its what a law is supposed to be, easy simple one line equation that facilitates back of the envelop calculation and holds more of less accurately over large domains. (F=ma; E=mc^2; PV=nRT; F=kx; V=IR).
As soon there is any hint of mathematical complexity you immediately call it an equation (Maxwell's equation
. Heck Boltzmann equation is an equation because it a log in it!S=k Ln(W). On such pedagogical trivialities does the difference between what is and what is not a law lies.
Its actually what we researchers in gases consider to be THE LAW. For the people in electricity and magnetism it will be V=IR. Those working with vibration and solid mechanics will go for F=kx and chemists will go for K_eq= [A]/[C][D] (law of mass action). None of them follow your criteria.
I dare-say you will find sillier pronouncements from modern theoretical physicists. Though I am not sure what you are talking about with Einstein. Until the Bell's inequality was experimentally validated, it was not at all clear that Bohr had it more right.
The laws of thermodynamics was formulated in terms of heat engines by Joule, Carnot, Clausius, Maxwell etc. before statistical thermodynamics became a thing. Maxwell made the first stab at it using kinetic theory of gases and made the first advancement in statistical mechanics in his Theory of Heat book and was very well received. I am not quite sure what caused the rift between Boltzmann and his critics, but I am certain that dispute was less about atomic physics and more about the people involved.
http://www.terpconnect.umd.edu/~lvrmr/History/Foundations.html
I am sorry but scientists are not beholden to philosophers to tell them what should or should not be called laws. The reason why new laws are not being formulated is because physics has developed to a point where complicated 2nd and 3rd order equations have become central to most research. But if you look at recent example, you can see Hubble's Law (v=HD).
No, I don't think the theory of evolution has been proven. To the contrary, evidence has mounted against the theory, and some scientists are openly rejecting the theory outright, based on that evidence.
Thief
Rogue Theologian
I think the verse you quoted speaks of mind and spirit
compared to the void and the lack of light (any kind).....God would be that First Light
Thief
Rogue Theologian
but I also believe the garden event happened
Man took a sudden diversion from that form dealt on Day Six