steve_bank
Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
Philosophers have been positing naturalism since as far back as Thales of Miletus. But the disadvantage was that the ancients only had their own two eyes to measure the universe. They didn't have the tools to discover that the natural world is both far grander and far more fine-grained than at first appearances.
So what do we do when something strange happens that can't be easily understood--like why did someone get sick just three days after talking back to the village leader? With only a superficial understanding of the world, we can either say, "We don't know" which is unsatisfying, or we can say he was cursed by the gods, or some other unfalsifiable doctrine. Unfalsifiable, that is, until we invented microscopes and discovered germs.
Exactly. Science only became really successful with the age of scientific instruments. The invention of mechanical clocks. The invention of reading glasses. Then telescopes, microscopes, thermometers, and using the tools of alchemists to develop chemistry. This lead to whole new worlds to explore,not hinted of in the Bible and unknown to the Greek philosophers. Now the best minds had something to work with. Progress could be made. Science as an enterprise became organized. Rise of things like steam engines drove physics and the invention of thermodynamics. Scientific instruments allowed science to grow beyond the bounds of armchair theorizing. The experimenters became kings of science.
Not disagreeing, but it is more than just the physical instruments, which don't solve the "garbage-in garbage-out" problem. Armchair theorizing was also limited by a lack of formalized intellectual principles for empirical observation. The need for random and/or representative observations, larger samples, control over extraneous variables, and accounting for chance co-variation are all essential to scientific progress. Also, secularization and legal protections of free thought are neccessary conditions for sound science on a large scale. Authoritarian dogmas which include monotheism coercively prohibit honest questioning of many core assumptions. Germs were observed via early telescopes 200 years before germ theory of disease was accepted, with the early theories viewing germs as effects rather than causes of diseases. Even micro level observation itself doesn't get you very far if it is not done in a rigorous systematic way where all assumptions are questioned and all alternatives are considered.
Science is at least as much about the principles of reasoning applied before, during, and after the observations and data collection than the about the observations and data itself.
How is carpentry not about logic and reasoning?