Posted: Apr 24, 2014 10:30 am
Mick wrote:Calilasseia wrote:Mick wrote:"Confusing science with answering why questions"
Patient: Why is my nose running?
Doctor: Sorry, science doesn't answer that question!
Lol
Got something other than infantile caricature to offer here, Mick?
Because even without professional medical knowledge, I can answer this one.
Patient: "Why is my noise running?"
Me: "The coronaviruses that generated your cold symptoms, resulted in the death of some of your epithelial cells in the mucous membranes of your nose, and the resulting immune response to non-programmed cell death stimulated the remaining epithelial cells (in particular the Bowman's glands in the nasal mucosae) to secrete copious quantities of mucins and IgA, the latter compound itself being an immunoglobulin helping to protect the mucosae against further pathogenic attack. Your runny nose is the visible sign of this increased secretion."
you missed the point.
No I didn't. Because, in your eagerness to post yet another infantile caricature and congratulate yourself for doing so, you made the classic mistake of erecting an example where "why?" is synonymous with "what is the underlying mechanism?" Which renders "why?" as in "what imaginary magic entity decreed this and for what reasons?" superfluous to requirements and irrelevant, as said question is increasingly being rendered.
Mick wrote:If science can't answer the why questions
Which presumes in advance that those questions actually possess substantive meaning.
Mick wrote:then it can't answer my question, the one about the runny nose.
Except that your apologetic conflation of two different semantic frameworks, both applied to the word "why", failed precisely because those semantic frameworks being conflated in your apologetics are fundamentally different.
Mick wrote:But of course it can, to some degree or other.
Oh wait, that's precisely what I did above - provide a substantive answer to an observed phenomenon. Something that pedlars of apologetics continue to fail to do, every time they try and claim that their pet magic entities were responsible. Once again, I'm still waiting to see a supernaturalist answer that awkward question I keep inferring whenever I contrast the success of science with the abject failure of mythology. Namely, if the authors of mythology were purportedly handed the keys to the cosmos, in a manner purportedly denied to scientists, then how come those authors were incapable of even fantasising about entities and phenomena, that those same, purportedly "handicapped" scientists, not only alighted upon, and provided reliable evidence for, but also placed within precise, usefully predictive quantitative frameworks, in accord with observation to 15 decimal places, of a sort that the authors of mythology manifestly failed to provide, and showed no signs of ever being able to provide? If these people were supposedly given "privileged" information by an invisible magic man, how come a whole group of other people, purportedly denied this blessing, achieved spectacular success of a sort manifestly never even remotely approached by the purportedly "privileged" recipients of purportedly "divine" information?