>>10886415>There are literally tens of millions of counter-examples to your statement south of the border from where I liveNo matter what they claim, if they use technology and believe it works according to regular, uniform laws, then they believe in science. Hell, even in order to sew a botton you need to believe in these basic principles of the scientific worldview.
>If even the most conspicuously unscientific people use these things, how can they be called scientific?Unscientific people use these principles selectively: they use the principles most of the time, but they pretend these principles do not apply in certain domains or in certain instances. Their whole attitude is self-contradictory and disingenuous. A scientific person applies those principles consistently instead of cherry-picking. That's the difference between scientific and unscientific people as far as I am concerned.
>Scientists brazenly entertain nonfalsifiable ideas all the timeI said in one of my previous posts that creative hypotheses are important in science. If those hypotheses turn out to be unfalsifiable it doesn't really matter so long as the theory built on those hypotheses is able to account for observed phenomena. Unscientific people hold onto their hypotheses even when empirical evidence disprove them, on the other hand.
>Conversely, I’m sure that if you take a believer in God, and slaughter his entire family in front of him, his theism will be “falsified.”Ever heard of the Book of Job?
>The point is that having strong convictions is not in any way unscientific, and being an flip flopper is not intrinsically scientific either.The difference is on what you ground that strong conviction. And, in general, a scientist should never hold a REALLY strong conviction about anything, because we can never be certain of anything much and we must always be open to the possibility of being wrong.