On Solving the Problem of Induction

[Redated post from 11/27/13]
Vincent Torley takes on Sean Carroll, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins and myself when it comes to justifying scientific knowledge. He spends some time on the dreaded problem of induction and goes on to pretend to know things he doesn't know, by asserting his particular god makes science possible such that, without pretending to know what he does, science has no justification. LINK.

The problem of induction was brought to the attention of intellectuals by David Hume. Atheist philosopher Stephen Law is on record as saying:

Hume’s argument continues to perplex both philosophers and scientists. There’s still no consensus about whether Hume is right. Some believe that we have no choice but to embrace Hume’s sceptical conclusion about the unobserved. Others believe that the conclusion is clearly absurd. But then the onus is on these defenders of “common sense” to show precisely what is wrong with Hume’s argument. No one has yet succeeded in doing this (or at least no one has succeeded in convincing a majority of philosophers that they have done so). LINK (see his conclusion).

Law concludes that no one has succeeded so far, which includes Vincent Torley's god hypothesis. Law refuses to pretend to know things he doesn't know, which I find admirable. However, we shouldn't forget that Hume lived in an era where philosophers were looking for certainty, following in the footsteps of Descartes. Hume brought the quest for certainty to an end though, showing that if we seek after certainty we cannot observe cause and effect, or that we have a self either (as opposed to a bundle of sensations). This is the difference that makes all the difference. The quest for a certain foundation for knowledge is, or should be, dead. But because of the lack of certainty Torley erroneously inserts his unevidenced mysterious miracle god-hypothesis into the equation.

So in an attempt to engage Torley without spending too much time on it, let me just quote from what I wrote in my book, The Outsider Test for Faith.

If all we ever do is think exclusively in terms of the probabilities, as I’ll argue later (in chapters 7 and 10), then this problem [of induction] is pretty much solved. We’re not looking for certainty. We only need to think in terms of the probabilities. To someone who objects that we cannot know enough to determine what the actual probabilities are, I simply respond by looking at the overwhelming evidence. The daily evidence from scientists around the globe is that when they replicate the same exact tests of the same exact phenomena under the same exact conditions they receive the same exact results. Could there be on a rare occasion a scientific test like this where different results obtain? Yes, this is possible. So what? Possibilities that rare, that as far as we know have never occurred in the laboratory, simply do not matter. They change nothing about how scientists should proceed, or what they should infer, or what they should predict from their observations, even if someday on some extremely rare occasion they end up being wrong. Is it relevant to us that the process of induction may not work at the subatomic/quantum level or into the far reaches of the universe (or multiverse)? No. Scientific induction works extremely well in our plane of existence, and it is worth noting, too, that quantum physics is still in many ways in its infancy. (pp. 70-71)

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As a side note, Torley accused me of addressing a straw man. Nope, he's wrong about this too.