Video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI6yXt1hIXA&feature=youtu.be
00:10
Imran : Today's show we are discussing something very interesting, that is Richard Dawkin's support IERA's narrative . Now there are a few questions that arise from this and
1) what is this narrative and
2) How does he support this narrative
Saboor: I can answer the first one, the second one's going to have to wait till the end of the show
Imran : Okay so let us address the first one, what is this narrative?
Saboor: Okay, our narrative is when it comes to evolution , that a scientific fact isn't neccessarily an absolute fact, right?
Imran: Yes
Saboor: and the counter narrative to this is that evolution, darwanian evolution is an absolute fact, whoever challenges it is committing intellectual suicide and it is written in stone. It's true and it's never going to change and it is a brute fact of reality
Imran: Okay, so two questions that arise from what you just said.
1) Is evolution a scientific fact? and
2) Define for us what is a scientific fact?
Saboor: Okay, so is evolution a scientific fact? Now this is an area where there could be a lot of dispute so there could be like someone could say it is a scientific fact, others would say there are big problems with observation , actually no one can even see any macro evolution in real time and you know we're going to get into this whole discussion...
Imran: Generally speaking for the case of this video, let us accept for the sake of discussion that it is considered a scientific fact amongst the majority of scientific community? right?
Saboor: yes that'll be a fair way to carry on.
Imran : so what is a scientific fact now, define that for us?
Saboor: Scientific fact is something which obviously goes through a scientific method so you have observation, experimentation, you know falsification - its confirmed or falsified - and then it goes through pier review and if its new knowledge it becomes like a theory and if it is generally has a consensus among the scientific community , in scientific discourse you'd call it a fact in science
Imran: Okay, good. This being the case, is there problems with scientific facts? This is another question we need to tackle.
Saboor: I wouldn't use the word problems i would say "limits"
Imran : Okay, so are there limits to such facts
Saboor: Yes, there are limits because it is very counter intuitive to think that scientific fact can be wrong because science has given us so much. It's given us cameras and iphones and satellites and all those things.. so you will think that science will never change, or scientific fact will never change but they actually do!
Like for e.g in the beginning of the 20th century there was a consensus among scientists which was that the University is eternal - a steady state model - and it was a scientific fact , it was (taken as) a brute fact of reality; what actually happened after a few years - the hubble telescope - we discovered the universe is expanding so this scientific fact was WRONG!
Universe was not eternal , it had a begining some 13.7 billion years ago; likewise around the same time Einstein's view of the universe it prevailed over the newtonian view of the universe so you always have these revolutions and para dime shifts and you know changes
Imran : scientific facts change, now that leads me to another thing which is that something is going on here which is leading scientific facts to change or allowing them that room to change and this leads me to think that it is something to do with the method itself which is the scientific method, so there are some limiting factors about the scientific method itself right?
Saboor: yes
Imran : One ; i think we can discuss briefly is the problem of deduction, so maybe you'd want to clear that for us
Saboor: Let us take the example of a scientist in wales . A scientist in wales must find out what colour sheep are. So he travels all over whales and sees all the sheeps are white so he comes up with a hypothesis that the sheep are white. He tests it out, every sheep that he sees is white so it is a scientific fact for him that sheep are white. Say this happens 300 years ago there is not T.V, no internet nothing like that.
Then he travels to say New zealand and he comes across a black sheep; which is going against his current theory
imran : yea
Saboor: that's basically the problem of induction. So when you get new evidence which goes against your previous evidences , conclusions.
Imran : and the problem there is that you are always limited to how many observations you have at hand and based on those observations you make your inference and there is room for error because it is possible that the next sheep or next ten sheep could be black or blue or pink for that matter
Saboor: Exactly , look there are somethings so certain about. For e.g. the scientists believed at one point that the sun is stationary , it didn't move. And anybody who said that the sun had an orbit, would be mad , would be (deemed) crazy. So anybody who was a Muslim at that time and you know in the qur'an it mentions the sun has an orbit ; he would be like no that is impossible - we can see the sun it's not moving - but again when we discover the universe is much bigger than we thought, the sun goes around the milkyway galaxy in millions of years of ..you know over 200 million years in terms of orbit .
So again something that we were so sure about , because of the problem of induction it goes through a You Turn and the interesting thing here Imran is not one or two things in the history of science where there is a U-Turn ; (but rather) the whole history of science is filled with U-Turn's and you know we think of science as an accumulation of eternal truth - (but) It's not ! - and as it mentions in the introduction to the Philosophy of science by Oxford University that
"Science is revisable. Hence to talk of scientific proof is dangerous, because the term fosters the idea of conclusions that are graven in stone" [Ref: Gillian Barker and Phillip kitcher. Philosopher of science. A new introduction. Oxford University Press 2014, p. 17]
Now this is information which obviously the academics know, but the laymen doesn't!
Imran: Okay so let me sum this up, so to touch a point there. We only mentioned induction as one example but there are several examples , several limiting factors of the scientific factors. Not to say it is a bad method, it is an excellent method but what we're saying is we appreciate it for what it actually is. and i guess what happens when you do that is you end up doing justice with the method itself. Once you understand its limits and it's scope - so on and so forth - right.
Now understanding this, our narrative then just to sum is that - science as a methodology is a beautiful method ; it works but its limited , has limited factors and it can't give us a 100% truth. Just based on induction itself it can give us from 0-99% , it can't give us a 100 % . Therefore any theory that science promotes or proposes can't be a 100% true. There they may be scientific facts but they may not be absolute facts.
Saboor: Yes
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Video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI6yXt1hIXA&feature=youtu.be
