"Taking Science on Faith" - find the logical fallacy, kids!

This kind of horse shit apologetics (small 'a', not big 'A') just irritates the fuck out of me, even more so given that the author is a physics professor and should know better. Here's the op-ed, and here's the problem with it:

First of all (and this is mostly just kind of an annoyed aside), the observation isn't even remotely novel. It's been around for quite a while, and anyone who took even the most basic course in philosophy will recognize we've slammed head-first, yet again, into Hume's problem of induction. You just rediscovered it, Mr. Davies. Congratulations. You want a cookie for that brilliant insight?

Okay, so if we start worrying on a philosophical level about the methodologies of science, then yes, Hume threw us a hell of a curve ball, one that is basically unresolvable. We only expect the future to resemble the past because, in the past, the future has typically resembled the past, etc. etc., blah blah blah. It is entirely possible that we could wake up tomorrow, the sky would be green, everything would be floating, the sun would have exploded, and time would be going backwards. Nothing in science can guarantee that won't happen.

So? Why is that an indictment of science? If you read Feynman's stuff (as I was trying to get a certain crackpot, who understands science even _less_ than Davies does, to do) he'll tell you that doubt and uncertainty are quintessential to science. Let's remember what the scientific method is:

1. observe
2. theorize
3. test
   

Note the conspicuous absense of "4. Declare as absolute, inviolate truth for ever more." Scientific theories hold until they don't. If the sun turns purple tomorrow, fine. All the theories the sun turning purple violates get thrown out. Sure, that would definitely turn the scientific _community_ on its head as it would constitute a violation of a lot of principles that had certainly seemed inviolate. But that wouldn't indict science as a whole even slightly. Step 3 is ongoing. It's never, philosophically speaking, done. Just because we continue to take as given theories that have as-yet failed to be falsified and build on them does not mean that it is _impossible_ that they will be falsified in the future. We just, personally, would be really damned surprised if certain ones were falsified at this point, because there is a mountain of evidence that has failed to falsify them, and DAMN did we ever spend a lot of time and money trying to rip them apart.

So, where Davies claims that, "Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith," I claim that Davies needs to go the fuck back to school because he doesn't understand the philosophical underpinnings of science, and he should keep his damn yap shut (or at least refrain from publishing idiotic op-eds in the New York Times) until he does.

(yes, I know I'm taking on a cranky tone...I'm just tired of seeing this kind of shoddy thinking over and over again, and if a damn academic can't get it right, we have no hope of the voting populace differentiating between pseudoscience like creationism/ID and _actual_ science)

Now, an entirely separate issue Davies brings up is the origin of the set of laws that (seem to, so far) govern the universe. Davies off-handedly dismisses his colleagues who claim, "that’s not a scientific question," but in fact (again if Davies understood science at all), that's the right answer. Why? Because we have absolutely no way of testing any hypothesis we come up with. Any explanation you could come up with as to why the set of laws are the way they are is almost by definition untestable. Think about it: how the hell would you test any explanation you came up with? What experiment could you do that would invalidate your hypothesis?

Here's another way to look at it: our only experience is with the particular universe we live in. Religious philosophers always like to posit things like, "Why is there something instead of nothing?" and then use that to justify a belief in god, but if we're being intellectually honest here, we have no justification for believing nothing is any more or less reasonable than something. We have no frame of reference, no way to control for variables. It's not like we have been in 99 other universes where there was nothing and then we happened upon this one where there finally was something. Nope. Just this one.

Similarly, we have no justification to believing this particular something is more or less reasonable a universe than some other, less life-friendly something. We have no framework in which to evaluate such reasonableness. We're kind of SOL on the scientific front in this regard. These are questions more suitable for philosophers and religions, although I of course feel the need to point out that any ideas they come up with are merely finely crafted bull-shittery since such ideas would be, say it with me now, untestable and unverifiable.

Sigh. The only thing worse than dumb people is dumb people who should be, and think they are, smart.