Riffing off his book, he The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art (2019) tells us:
Every scientist knows this, but for two centuries they have fallen mute about it, preferring instead a safer narrative about the ‘empirical method’ or ‘the logic of scientific discovery’. Science education favours the presentation of results, and a focus on knowledge, rather than the human stories of wonder, imagination, failed ideas and those glorious and uninvited moments of illumination that thread through the lives of all who actually do science. Our media mouths the same message – I will never forget the BBC documentary on computer science in which the presenter assured viewers, face to camera, that there is no room for imagination in science. No wonder my young colleagues had become disillusioned.
Tom McLeish, “Science is deeply imaginative: why is this treated as a secret?” at Aeon
Hmmm. The multiverse crowd does not lack imagination. Nor do those who have convinced themselves of panpsychism. The thing about imagination in science is that it must be disciplined. If it isn’t, it ends up competing with fiction, without the style.
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A big part of science is conjecture, which means making up “What if” scenarios. Often those scenarios get discussed a lot for a long time, and people begin to assume they are true just because they keep hearing them.
Science is supposed to investigate what has not been explained, not explain what has not been investigated.
A smart point ! Very important as well. Isn’t it how Darwinists have got away with their endless piffle ?
A smart point and pivotal. Or we would never have heard of .Darwin, would we ?
As also, News’ stylish summation.:
‘… It ends up competing with fiction, without the style.’
SmartAZ @1:
“Science is supposed to investigate what has not been explained, not explain what has not been investigated.”
The Darwin’s club members haven’t got that yet.
The multiverse is the only PLAUSIBLE response to the statistical critique of Darwinism, so I give them points for coming up with SOMETHING better than “the statistical odds of any past event are 1.0.” I think it is time we developed a more articulate rebuttal to the multiverse explanation. The folks at the Discovery Institute have sketched out the beginnings of such a response–a multiverse can ‘explain’ how we got the first self-replicating molecule and the evolutionary line that led directly to an intelligence capable of asking questions about the universe, but it CAN’T explain why there are any OTHER species off that main line that exhibit OTHER irreducibly complex structures.
The “weak anthropic principle” in a “many worlds interpretation” of physics as we know it guarantees that there will be an “observer” to wonder how he got here. But it does NOT guarantee that there will be birds flying overhead with wings (and other structures) that are irreducibly complex in their own right. In fact, WAP+MWI it predicts there should NOT be any irreducibly complex structure that did not emerge as a step towards the first human “observer.”
I think it is fair to say that most advancements in science were due to the imagination (thinking outside the box) or serendipity.
Imagination, and/or ‘guesses’, have their place in science and that place is in the forming of a hypothesis.
But those hypothesis, and/or guesses, are SUPPOSE to be tested against the empirical evidence to see if they are true or not. As Richard Feynman explained, ‘If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is… If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
Where Darwinian Atheists, (and people who toe the methodological naturalism party line in general), go off the rails is that, believe it or not, their imagination somehow becomes the empirical evidence for their hypothesis.
As Stephen Jay Gould explained, “Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers “Just So stories”. When evolutionists study individual adaptations, when they try to explain form and behaviour by reconstructing history and assessing current utility, they also tell just so stories – and the agent is natural selection.
Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.”
Here are a few more quotes along that line:
As Darwinists, and Atheists in general, weave their endless ‘just so stories’, testability, (and/or the criteria of falsification, i.e. Popper), in science somehow gets tossed to the wayside and is, for all practical purposes, simply ignored by Darwinists and by Atheists is general.
Karl Popper stated that “In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.”
Here are a few falsification of Darwin’s theory that Darwinists simply refuse to ever accept as falsifications for their theory
Verse:
Besides Darwinists refusing to adhere to the criteria of falsification for their supposed scientific theory, by any other reasonable measure that one may wish to judge whether Darwinian evolution even qualifies as a science in the first place, Darwinism fails to meet those criteria as well:
Simply put, Darwinian evolution is more properly classified as a pseudoscience, even as a religion for atheists, rather than being classified as a real and testable science.
In fact, directly contrary to what is popularly believed, all of science, every nook and cranny of it, is based on intelligent design and is certainly not based on methodological naturalism as is presupposed by atheistic Darwinists.
From the essential Christian presuppositions that undergird the founding of modern science, (i.e. that the universe is rational and that the minds of men, being made in the ‘image of God’, can dare understand that rationality), to the intelligent design of the scientific instruments and experiments themselves, to the logical and mathematical analysis of experimental results, from top to bottom science itself is certainly not ‘natural’.
Not one scientific instrument would ever exist if men did not first intelligently design that scientific instrument. Not one test tube, microscope, telescope, spectroscope, or etc.. etc.., was ever found just laying around on a beach somewhere which was ‘naturally’ constructed by nature. Not one experimental result would ever be rationally analysed since there would be no immaterial minds to rationally analyze the immaterial mathematics that lay behind the intelligently designed experiments in the first place.
In fact, (as I have pointed out several times now), assuming Naturalism instead of Theism as the worldview on which all of science is based leads to the catastrophic epistemological failure of science itself.
Thus, although the Darwinian atheist may firmly believes he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for methodological naturalism), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to.
It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.