What is your take on creationism/creationists?

[Reasonable]

richardhutnik said:

WereKitten said:

 

You're still playing with words.

Rationalism and scientific method work. They are proven day-in day-out by billions of people. I don't need to have blind faith in the method, I can assess its utility by its results and live with it as the temporary best tool. Especially because it's a self-correcting tool.

Again, please point me to an example of failure of the scientific method or of rationalism, since you claimed such cases exist.

Second, I actually read Taleb's "The Black Swan", and it is not about refuting induction or causality at large.

Strict induction has never been considered a source of absolute scientific results. Popper formalized the argument against induction in scientific theories, but obviously the problem dates back to early empiric schools.

Rationalism and the scientific method work... when you have the right conditions for them to do so.  When they do, as in the case of innovation and the arts, or understanding human behavior, they are limited.  Also, in the scientific method, the origin of a hypothesis is not rational at all.  It will usually come as a flash of insight.  There is a degree of irrational in the scientific method.

A place that practical testing of how things work is economics, and you see that there is irrationality in how economies work.  Here is a show Nova ran on this:

http://video.pbs.org/video/1479100777/

I'd argue (sorry to but in BTW) that the scientific method works wonderfully well in most circumstances as a principle.  However, clearly because in the end it is being employed by emotional, sometimes irrational human beings, some of whom will indeed have unique flashes of insight (Darwin being one of them and Einstein another obvious one) you will see uneven results at times.

But in the end, much like evolution, the point of scientific method in the larger picture is to rely on time and multiple tests and inputs to smooth out and remove elements introduced by human flaws.

At this stage, it seems clear the evidence, for example, massively - and I mean massively - points to evolution as being as close to a fact as you're likely to pin something like that down vs the obvious flaws with creationsim.

As an aside, it's interesting to me that some school's of thought indicate our basic makeup actually makes it hard fur us to process and understand a concept such as evolution, and this is now seen as explaining why it took so long for someone to have the flash of insight in the first place - for example from the evidence you'd have thought someone would have posited evolution much earlier whereas it's pretty clear that without Einstein's flash of intuition we might still not have the General Theory of Relativity.