aardvark said:
there are lots of things left to explain but the majority of the basics (in physics/chemistry/biology) have been well extablished by science - and proven as facts.
Science defines very little as fact... You can define a relationship or a correlation as accurate if it holds true, you can define a model that represents something as a theory, and as accurate to the data, in both a predictive and an emperical fashion, but even that's not the same thing as saying something is a fact.
Can you give me an example of some scientific 'facts' that are unchallengeable, proven and accepted. (Note facts, not assumptions required by the scientific method). I can think of a few, but what is defined as the 'fact' part is normally incredibly narrow and generally not much use. (For example, mavity. The fact part is that the force exists, best we can tell anyway. How it exists, how it acts and why the data looks the way it does is all theory and best fit models.)
science tells me that, for example, levitation is impossible - so when i see david blaine, or david copperfield doing it on tv or in a video then i know its a trick, an illusion - you seem to be the sort of person who would believe that it was a fact, despite all the evidence pointing to the contrary.
I guess you don't know me very well then. I'm a scientist by education, and science will always be my first port of call when looking for an explaination for a specific event or situation. However, I also recognise the limits of science and the way it investigates anything, as well as science's purpose (which is prediction, not explaination), and the potential limits of using Occum's razor as a method of model selection if you are searching for understanding, rather than prediction.
Science, incidentally, doesn't claim anything is impossible, or doesn't exist. Scientists do that, but that's a different thing entirely. Science works on a provable hypothesis basis. Take your example of levitation. Science doesn't say it's impossible, there are several ways levitation could be achieved that would be measurable by science (if you had a way to generate enough thrust to counter mavity for your body mass, for example, or even if you could find a way to not be effected by mavity). Science doesn't regard either of these possibilities as impossible, but there's no recorded evidence of it happening. Progression of the existing models for various things would also suggest it's unlikely to be proven, but models are always subject to change if new information is discovered.
You need to be very careful about confusing science with scientists. Claiming that science says things such as 'that's impossible', 'there is no god' etc etc is meaningless. Scientists claim such things, science does not.
With that in mind, if I see something, I'll look to science first for an explaination, if science does not currently offer one, I won't discount it as being impossible, especially when it would mean disregarding valid evidence not easily explained in order to do so. Some posters on here will remeber stories about the house I used to live in, which fulfilled several of the classic definitions of being haunted. Science offered no explaination there for events I witnessed with my own eyes, physical manifestations with no logical explaination, multiple times over the three years I lived in that house. Does that mean the events didn't occur? No, they certainly did occur, and you would be an incredibly bad scientist if you just discarded the data you had gathered because it didn't fit a pattern you were expecting without trying to investigate why. Likewise in much of the time I've done martial arts, I've seen strange things that don't fit in with scientific explaination (as seen in MB&KAM), with my own eyes, and in a few cases, with my own body. Again, multiple events verified by multiple witnesses.
Whether you believe me or not is immatterial, my beliefs and views do not require your belief. However I do beleive that many people (normally those who view science from a layman's perspective) put far too much stock in science for things it was never designed to offer explainations for, they look to Science as almost a new religion in the way they follow it, and some scientists use that to present their own beliefs as being scientific, which perpetuates the problem.
), I've seen pictures and read accounts of all this stuff. It's probably safe to say they didn't receive any kind of QiGong training, but they still managed to perform the same type of thing.
