It's hard to give a simple yes-or-no answer to the question, not least because it's by no means clear that if there is a God, this is the sort of thing that science can establish. Atheists such as Dawkins often treat belief in God as though it were simply on the same playing field as evolution, for example -- as though it's a sort of science-like hypothesis intended to explain something about the empirical facts. There are several problems with that view, but one important problem is this: to the extent that religious claims are meant to "explain" things, it's not clear that they're intended to do it at the same level or in the same way as scientific hypotheses. Rather, they seem to function as views about what's necessary to make sense of things at all. A comparison may help here. Consider mathematical truths. Some philosophers think that the only way to account for them is to say that there really are such things as numbers. Other philosophers try to show that we can make sense of mathematics...

The best answer to your first question, I think, is that we do it that way we check scientific hypotheses in general: we make predictions, do experiments, etc. The details, of course, are best left to the physicists, but unless the worry is a skeptical question about scientific knowledge in general, we proceed in the usual ways that science proceeds: we look for experimental results that would be improbable if Newton were wrong, but probable if he were right. As for whether gravity exists, this question needs some clarifying, I think. Suppose we have good reason to think that bodies in the universe behave pretty much as Newton's laws say they should. On one way of looking at things, this is exactly what the existence of "gravity" amounts to: confirming Newton's laws (or some related set of laws) is what it means to confirm that gravity exists, because there's nothing more to gravity than nature acting in accord with certain laws. On another view, the existence of gravitation amounts to the...

I'm not entirely sure from your way of putting it exactly what's at issue. I think you're asking whether answering a "why" question is always a matter of providing a sufficient condition for whatever we're "why"ing about. If that's it, I'd say no. One reason is that when we ask a "why?" question, we're usually looking for something that gives us some insight, and not all sufficient conditions do that. For example: suppose we consider some isolated physical system that's governed by strict laws. And suppose the state of this system at some moment is S . We might ask "why is the state of the system S ?" Saying "because 10 seconds ago, the state was S' , and the laws of the system guarantee that S' will evolve into S over a 10-second period," then we've provided a sufficient codition, but we haven't given a good answer to the "Why?" question. If we're puzzled about why the state is S right now, we're likely to be just as puzzled by why it was S' 10 seconds ago. So giving a...

The best piece of advice I ever heard on this issue came in a talk I heard years ago about Darwin. Darwin wanted to convince us of something that wasn't at all obvious when he introduced it. But more to the point, he wanted to be taken seriously by the scientific community. How did he do it? By spending the early part of his career demonstrating that he could do what his fellow scientists did -- that he could do credible, solid research that his colleagues would recognize as such. That made it possible for him to be taken seriously when he introduced his novel ideas. If someone is going to invest the time and energy needed to explore and evaluate ideas that are far from the mainstream, they need good reason to think that the effort might pay off. For every brilliant maverick in any field, there are at least 10 cranks. We might put it this way: if you want to persuade your peers, you need to be accepted by them as an able worker in your field. And doing that has an advantage from your own...

Perhaps we need to ask a prior question: why would we make such a challenge? And living in a country where large numbers of people are suspicious of evolution and think that people who worry about global warming or nutty or part of a conspiracy, I'm not so sure that society really is "science worshiping." If you want to know the truth about the natural world, science is your best bet. That's because "science" isn't a secret cabal, but most importantly it's a set of intellectual methods that let us explore the empirical world systematically, weed out unpromising hypotheses, and gauge the strength of likely explanations. Does acupuncture work for back pain? The answer may well be yes. But anecdotes aren't enough to make the case. We need the kind of systematic techniques that we call science. At the other end of the spectrum, how many dimensions does space-time have? We may never know for sure. But it's a safe bet that our best answer will come from science. And on it goes. If rationalism ...

I suspect I may be missing what's at issue here. Analyzing concepts is part of the philosopher's stock-in-trade, and that applies no less to scientific concepts than to other sorts. Not being a social scientists, I don't have a good, detailed feel for how social scientists use the phrase "social interaction" nor for how it fits into social science theorizing. That also means that I don't have a good feel for whether there are any meaty philosophical issues here. But I can well imagine that there might be, and insofar as there are, it's hard to see why philosophers of the social sciences wouldn't just be doing their jobs by undertaking the appropriate analyses.

The answer I'd want to offer isn't "philosophical" in the sense of being some sort of response to skeptical arguments. It's more straightforward and more from the point of view of science itself, as it were. And the answer, in general, is just that we've gotten a lot better at measuring things, doing experiments and analyzing data. We've also got a great deal more data than we used to have. A comparison of sorts: when the telescope came on the scene, we came relatively quickly to the conclusion that we could say a good deal more, a good deal more reliably, about the heavens than we could before. Similar comments apply to the old-fashined optical microscope, and even more so to devices like the electron microscope. Likewise, as statistics came into its own, we got a good deal better at analyzing data and drawing robust conclusions from it. It's arguable that the kinds of modeling techniques that computers have allowed us to develop are yet another example. So at least part of the answer has to do with...

My brief reply would be that I don't "believe in science" either. But I do believe that for many questions, science provides our best way of getting at the likely answers. And I also believe that in any number of cases, the most reasonable belief by far is that science has gotten it right. Are some illnesses caused by viruses? The evidence seems pretty overwhelming. Are there electrons? As some people like to point out, we've even learned how to manipulate them. Are water molecules made of hydrogen and oxygen? What reason is there to think not? The list could go on and on. Not everything that science says or has had to say is true. But then, I'm not aware of any infallible sources of knowledge, and science doesn't claim to be infallible. On the contrary, science takes much more seriously than people are usually inclined to that we are indeed fallible, and so we need to be careful when it comes to settling difficult empirical issues. But for a lareg range of questions, I can't even begin to...

On the one hand... There's some controversy here, but a nice, readable paper by Bradley Monton argues that methodological naturalism neither is nor should be a presupposition of science. Monton provides further references to the literature. To see the paper, click here . I think Monton makes a case that we can't use methodological naturalism as a criterion of demarcation between science and non-science. But then there may not be much we can say by way of offering strict criteria of demarcation between science and other activities. Even if science isn't, as it were ,"by definition" naturalistic [aside: when someone says that something is so "by definition, you should be suspicious] it's not an accident that across the sciences, researchers almost always start with and end up with naturalistic hypotheses. That includes researchers who count themselves as religious believers. There's no one simple reason for this; it's partly a matter of history, partly a matter of shared intellectual values, partly...

How about neither? Or both? (Or both neither and both?) Put another way... Time is just one of our many concepts. By far most people who use the concept of time aren't philosophers and aren't scientists either. And so the concept of time as such isn't a peculiarly philosophical concept, nor a peculiarly scientific one. That said, time has a special place in science as a fundamental parameter. We can do a lot of science without the concept of sex, for example, even though there's a place in science for the study of sex. (And of course, if there were no sex, science would grind to a halt in a few decades!) But outside of mathematics, we can't do much science without the concept of time. Moreover, physicists have things to say about time that are deep and surprising and were mostly beyond the imagination of the philosophers and the folk until relatively recently. Philosophers have long taken an interest in time as well, and have taken it as a special subject for philosophical analysis. They've...