Science 1 ok
File name -- science File created date -- 01:51 am Thursday, May 6 2004
How do we know that a theory is scientific?
How do we know that a belief system is scientific?
A scientific theory tries to be coherent with what we understand science to be as a whole -- it is coherent. A scientific theory does not create concepts that can not be related to other well established scientific ideas or repeatable experimental evidence -- frugal and simple. A scientific theory can be understood to the point of being useful in predicting outcomes of events reliably -- it is useful. It tries not to contradict itself -- it is logical. Science tries to be understandable, intelligible, coherent, logical, rational useful, simple, frugal, consistent. A scientific theory has to tie itself to the scientific framework. Theories of immortality have not done this because souls can not be studied. They are not consistent with the rest of science. They are not intelligible in terms with the rest of science.
Why are other theories about immortality unscientific? Many theories of immortality are based on a soul like concept. It can be defined in many ways but it is a thing that has properties that are independent of matter yet is supposed to interact with matter and energy. It is the name for the concept that is supposed to perpetuate aspects of an individual person beyond death, but is not material with material limitations. What makes the concept unscientific is that it is a name for a concept that there is no consistently repeatable evidence for, no coherent theory that interrelates it to other areas of scientific knowledge. If I ask scientific questions about it the answers are unknown, for instance; How do I find a soul? How does it interact with matter and energy. How can this interaction with matter be measured? Why does it need to exist? Does it exist in space, in time? Does a body have to have a soul? Can a person be consciousness with out a soul. If the soul is the source of consciousness why does there need to be a brain? How do you disconnect a soul from a body? Can a body contain more than one soul? How can you do this? Why can souls remember so little if anything from past lives? There are many strange things we have found within science. If a soul actually exists, scientists would be trying to understand every aspect of the soul. Understanding every aspect of the soul would give us very useful technological abilities. Imagine if we actually understood souls in a scientific way. We could send souls to the next life with full memories and we would not need to educate children again they would already be able to walk, talk, read, write, do math, understanding how to behave socially etc. We could see if souls were inherently stupid or stupid because of a stupid body. How smart can a soul be? Scientist have no problem with souls actually existing its just that there is nothing to study except the concept itself. An example of this is: Tom Sawyer, the fictional character in Mark Twain’s book of the same name as far as we know has never existed but there is a lot of knowledge about Tom Sawyer in the book. You can say that he got lost in a cave he had a girl that he really liked etc. Then you can ask questions about how tall he was? How old was he when he died. Did he have any kids etc. etc. You can be very scientific about this study. For instance, you can report that on page 200 he was lost in a cave. Or that on page 300 he was in paris. Then latter find that these statements are false. In the same way we can study souls scientifically. When we say that some one wrote this or that about souls at this time, or that certain populations believe in this type of soul and who was the individuals that developed these ideas. We are being scientific. We can also find that a certain types of functioning in the brain will produce a belief or knowledge about souls. We can study why people believe in souls or ghosts or little purple aliens or atoms.