Originally posted by Ytse
Well, from a purely scientific standpoint how can we explain if science is successful or not?
well, that requires a lot more definition.
Speaking generally, there is no such thing as "science". There are theories and hypotheses, but no overarching theory of science. It also depends what you mean by successful. Science by definition places success in predictive power, so it might be said that any particular scientific theory is successful if it is able to predict the results of a controlled experiment.
There is also the scientific method itself. Here, the only way the scientific method is successful is if you define success as "predicting or explaining the natural world". It is successful in this because it is the only method or theory in existence that can even come close to explaining the mechanisms behind the world.
Originally posted by Ytse
This is an old one you may be familiar with. Science tells us that tomorrow morning the sun will rise as it does every morning. Men have been making the same observation about the motion of the sun since prehistory. And every day it indeed rises again. But why is science successful in making such predictions?
This is an interesting interpretation, but a little askew from how a astronomer or astrophysicist might describe it.
For instance, the sun has no motion in the sky, although we see it as such, and coincidently, it does not rise. This is both a geocentric and ethnocentric way to describe the solar system.
Rather, scientists would explain the apparent motion of the sun through the sky as the rotation of the earth, and its rising each morning as the light from the sun reaching the point at which we are measuring from.
Originally posted by Ytse
As I said earlier we reason that the sun will rise in the morning because it's always risen in the morning in the past.
this is also wrong. While it is true that every morning you or I wake up the sun will rise, and the same was true of our fathers and grandfathers, and the same will be true for the next many generations of our children.
However, there was a time when the earth did no exist for the sun to "rise" on. There was a time when the sun was not in existence. There will be a time when the sun does not exist again.
The reason we say that the sun will rise tomorrow has nothing to do with the consistency of it. From a basic human psychological level, yes, thats exactly it, but from a scientific perspective, the sun will come up tomorrow morning because the earth will rotate to a point where the light from the sun reaches the place where you are.
Originally posted by Ytse
Now the question is, "how do we know the future will resemble the past?" This can be answered with what's called the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature. That nothing that is now impossible in principle was ever the case in the past. But how does one justify that principle? One could reason that in the past the future was always like the past. But that is attempting to justify induction with induction, and so gets us nowhere.
I did a google for this "principal of the uniformity of nature" and came up with nothing. It is something I have NEVER come across, nor does it sound remotely close to anything that is true in science.
For instance, the big bang and cosmic fine tuning would fly directly in the face of this.
Can you give me a link or whatever to where you got this as a description of science?