> Glad to see you too can eliminate centuries of philosophy by toying with definitions. There was a reason I phrased the whole thing with qualifiers like "in this view". It's the older view, the more consistent and useful one in my opinion, but not the only view. (Even now, the various definitions of "science" found in dictionaries are essentially identical to "experience".)

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I agree that the more general "reasoning from observation" idea is much older than the scientific method. If you find it more useful, feel free to read Aristotle instead of Newton for your physics. Just don't ask me to explain inertia for you.

I agree that words can have more than one meaning, but it doesn't mean that all of them are particularly relevant or useful. Modern science is distinguished by, above all else, the scientific method. The first definition in the American Heritage dictionary for science is "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena," which is basically the scientific method itself. Definition 3a in Merriam-Webster specifically mentions the method as well.

This is what I mean when I talk about science. I will go ahead and speak for scientists everywhere when I say this is roughly what they consider their trade to be as well. Let me know how many papers you see published in peer-reviewed science journals that don't have falsifiable claims.

> > The natural world is far more fantastic and bizarre than our everyday human experiences would ever suggest. Were I to witness a miracle, I doubt I would recognize it as evidence of the supernatural.
>
> Huh. You're right that there's a difference between a thing being proved in the abstract and it being proved to a person. I could smash a guy in the face yet not be able to prove to him that I'm solid, since there's nothing in the laws of physics to stop the air molecules in the room from converging on his face in that same instant. If a bunch of physicists witnessed the reanimation of a body that had been dead for days, they could likewise suppose that it was merely a chance matter of the molecules all suddenly moving in the right directions. But they'd be damn fools.

You're on to something now. Indeed, an event happening one time is not enough to prove something -- as you note the laws of physics predict we should get freak events every now and then (even entropy itself is only probabilistic). This is a reason why being able to test claims is so important, because it is very helpful to be able to run the same test many times.

That said, there is a world of difference between your examples. I know solid things exist and I have good reason to believe that all humans are solid. Before you punched me in the face, I would assume your fist is solid. If you hit me and I deny the solidity of your first, trying to explain it as a one-in-an-insanely-large-number quantum coincidence, I am being foolish. A much simpler explanation that fits well with the known laws of probability exists.

On the other hand, I don't know (in the scientific sense that I'm using the word science) that a god who reanimates dead people exists. If I see a corpse suddenly come back to life, I would be bewildered. But before I jumped to supernatural explanations, I'd have to exhaust every possible physical explanation. This is roughly the principle of parsimony, that one should not formulate unproved laws or phenomena to explain events if "simpler" explanations (that is explanations that fit with the known laws) exist. It is fundamental to the modern scientific process.

In the example of a corpse coming to life, I highly doubt any physicist or biologist would ever claim it was due to "the molecules all suddenly moving in the right directions." Were there no way to explain it, I reckon most would simply be willing to leave it as unexplained.

The willingness to leave some phenomena marked as "not yet understood" is another hallmark of modern science that does fit well with the "apply reason to observation" idea. We can create any number of somewhat reasonable explanations for any difficult phenomena -- which is precisely how we came up with insanely complicated geocentric solar models to explain things like the phases of Venus. But without being able to falsify our claims, they are not all that reliable and thus not that useful as scientific conclusions.

Stephen