A Quote by Leonard Susskind
There is a philosophy that says that if something is unobservable -- unobservable in principle -- it is not part of science. If there is no way to falsify or confirm a hypothesis, it belongs to the realm of metaphysical speculation, together with astrology and spiritualism. By that standard, most of the universe has no scientific reality -- it's just a figment of our imaginations.
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A hypothesis is empirical or scientific only if it can be tested by experience. A hypothesis or theory which cannot be, at least in principle, falsified by empirical observations and experiments does not belong to the realm of science.
Science ignores the spiritual realm because it is not amenable to scientific analysis. As importantly, the predictive success of Newtonian theory, emphasizing the primacy of a physical Universe, made the existence of spirit and God an extraneous hypothesis that offered no explanatory principles needed by science.
[Math is] not at all like science. There's no experiment I can do with test tubes and equipment and whatnot that will tell me the truth about a figment of my imagination. The only way to get at the truth about our imaginations is to use our imaginations.
I think moral philosophy is speculation on how we ought to live together done by people who have very little clue how people work. So I think most moral philosophy is disconnected from the species that we happen to be. In fact, they like it that way. Many moral philosophers insist that morality grows out of our rationality, that it applies to any rational being anywhere in the universe, and that it is not based on contingent or coincidental facts about our evolution.
Darwinian evolution is unscientific, unobservable, unbelievable, but understandable in a world that hates God.
If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case, get it out of the science classroom and send it back to church, where it belongs.
Philosophy is regarded by many as inseparable from speculation. ... Philosophy has proceeded from speculation to science.
We live in a scientific age, yet we assume that knowledge of science is the prerogative of only a small number of human beings, isolated and priestlike in their laboratories. This is not true. The materials of science are the materials of life itself. Science is part of the reality of living; it is the way, the how and the why for everything in our experience.
But I should be very sorry if an interpretation founded on a most conjectural scientific hypothesis were to get fastened to the text in Genesis... The rate of change of scientific hypothesis is naturally much more rapid than that of Biblical interpretations, so that if an interpretation is founded on such an hypothesis, it may help to keep the hypothesis above ground long after it ought to be buried and forgotten.
Global warming has long since passed from scientific hypothesis to the realm of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo.
The first and most important reason for its elimination is the unquestioned fact that evolution is not a science; it is a hypothesis only, a speculation.
There will always be divergence of views on the output gap, as it is unobservable in a rigorous direct sense. There are only estimates. How can there be a strong consensus on that?
Many of the concepts we once thought belonged to speculation or science fiction are now part of our understood reality.
The scientific discovery appears first as the hypothesis of an analogy; and science tends to become independent of the hypothesis.
"Methodological naturalism" and "metaphysical naturalism" are terms that often surface in the continuing battle between evolutionary biology and creationism/intelligent design. The methodological thesis says that scientific theories shouldn't postulate supernatural entities; the metaphysical thesis says that no such entities exist. In this debate, God is the supernatural entity at issue; the question isn't whether science gets to talk about mathematical entities if Platonism is correct.
It's worth noting that invoking God as the entity who set our universe in motion isn't contradicted by the data. Of course, scientists would say the supreme being hypothesis is faith, and outside the realm of science - that it's not amenable to experiment. But we currently have the same problem with the notion of parallel universes.
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