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Comment by craftsman | Hacker News Reader

I can’t reply to the question I was asked, so I reply here:

How many have I verified? I’m not sure of the #, but I’ve verified much of classical physics, chemistry, astronomical observations, and lots of things in electronics (some of which rely on quantum mechanics) and electromagnetism.

But as I said, they question is not whether you or I have personally verified everything, but whether they are verifiable in principle, by anyone. The claims of chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc, are verifiable. The claims of a holy man are not.

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> The claims of a holy man are not.

How come? The claims of holy men are verified by other holy men.

Man is imperfect. The scientific method is a process that verifies, humans implement and observe the output. With religion, humans "observe" more than they can verify. Religion admits as much that it lacks verification, that's why it has faith.

Religion wants the best of both worlds, saying it is endowed with logic and verification yet when pushed you get the same tired argument about faith and 'gods exist outside logic'. At the same time it wants to say that it doesn't have to participate. Why should your side be special? Why can't I ultimately resort to illogic? Who knows, maybe my atheistic views are derived from a system so abstracted from my intellectual senses that I can validly resort to claiming they may ultimately stem from a time/place far removed from logic also, I just don't claim that it's an anthropomorphic entity like a god.

>Man is imperfect.

Yes

>The scientific method is a process that verifies...

And this process is done by imperfect men...who you end up trusting...

And yet, this mythical common man--who you say has to just choose who to trust--will find that if he chooses to build civilization by trusting the imperfect holy men, it will pale in significance to the civilization built by other common men who choose to trust the imperfect scientists.

Except you can find another group of holy men who disagree with that group. And a third group that disagrees with those two groups. The number of groups ends up quite large, and nobody can quite seem to figure out a way to test whether one group has it a bit more right than the others.

> Except you can find another group of holy men who disagree with that group.

This happens in your "western science" also (despite all the ability to "test" things), he he he...excuse me. Couldn't help it.

With the difference being that the former do not self correct when it happens, while the latter ultimately do self correct.

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