A reasonable certainty may not exist either.
"This is where i fail to grasp your argument."
You fail to grasp the argument because you have been
conditioned to believe in the path of enlightenment (knowing)
through the logical acquisition of knowledge. This logical
acquisition of knowledge has as an initial step, the creation
of the assumptions. What is believed (faith) to be true!
Are the assumptions valid? There validity is unknown,
once again absolute knowledge is necessary to assess the validity
of an assumption(s).
You quoted Rene Descartes, "I think therefore I am". I am fond
of Rene Descartes, he regarded the senses as open to deception.
Hence, the only valid process Rene could rely on was his thought
process. Thus, the direct result of his thinking was that he existed,
this was his primary truth. He was certainly not an empiricist.
I would have debated the concept of Rene's existence of course.
Only when a person has received the Holy Spirit does a person
understand what existence really is. It is not an intellectual
realization or affirmation, but a spiritual enlightenment to the true
and valid realization of Jesus Christ. No assumptions, no rabbit from
the hat approach. This is not a probability of reasonable certainty
that science is handicapped by.
This is revelation of the only truth, we are created. Our existence
is maintained by Jesus, the source and author of life itself. Jesus
maintains all, the universe, you and I.
This is most certainly true Asanima, you regard science
as justifiable belief. Never absolutely true but an approximation
to some extent. Just what the approximation consists of becomes
a metaphysical pursuit Asanima. Surely you understand this.
Plato and the whole idea of an independent reality, moreover, took a shot
to the mouth in the 1920s with the advent of quantum mechanics.
According to that weird theory, which, among other things, explains why our
computers turn on every morning, there is an irreducible randomness at the
microscopic heart of reality that leaves an elementary particle, an electron, say,
in a sort of fog of being everywhere or anywhere, or being a wave or a particle,
until some measurement fixes it in place.
In that case, according to the standard interpretation of the subject, physics is not
about the world at all, but about only the outcomes of experiments, of our clumsy
interactions with that world. But 75 years later, those are still fighting words.
Einstein grumbled about God not playing dice.
But perhaps, as Dr. Davies complains, Plato is really dead and there are no timeless laws or truths.
A handful of poet-physicists harkening for more contingent nonabsolutist laws not
engraved in stone have tried to come up with prescriptions for what John Wheeler,
a physicist from Princeton and the University of Texas in Austin, called “law without law.”
As one example, Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics,
has invented a theory in which the laws of nature change with time. It envisions universes
nested like Russian dolls inside black holes, which are spawned with slightly different
characteristics each time around. But his theory lacks a meta law that would prescribe how
and why the laws change from generation to generation.
Holger Bech Nielsen, a Danish physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and one
of the early pioneers of string theory, has for a long time pursued a project he calls
Random Dynamics, which tries to show how the laws of physics could evolve naturally
from a more general notion he calls “world machinery.”
But, is it to soon for any Einsteinian to throw in his or her hand.
Since cosmologists don’t know how the universe came into being,
or even have a convincing theory, they have no way of addressing
the conundrum of where the laws of nature come from or whether
those laws are unique and inevitable or flaky as a leaf in the wind.
Oh, the assumptions are in themselves so problematic.
Methinks one has to believe Asanima, in the end that is
what science ulimately is, a belief system, a faith.
No certainty, comparable or otherwise in an empirical
construction.
