Leave Dawkins and his tribe of sceptics and atheists alone for Heaven's sake or Heaven will get a bad name from all those stupid priests and theologians who claim to know all about God and spiritual values. He has the braking effect on Church control over minds. It's time the silly hats brigade came to learn they and their wares have had their time and only then will Heaven be free of idiots.
Long live Dawkins Hichens et al.

socratease

A fascinating article.

“Nonetheless, as scientists we must also promote more realistically our ongoing struggle to understand and explain what it means to be scientific.”

You have hit the nail on the head.

On the one hand, as Kuhn has shown, the progress of science is an anthropological phenomenon. But on the other hand, science holds out the prospect of discovering universal propositions of fact which do not depend on historical categories. But ‘the devil’s in the detail’. The closer we get to saying what the method of discovery actually *is*, the slipperier it seems to get.

“Yet Hume himself showed science to be inherently irrational because it relies, in part, on assumed theories that must reach beyond what we can ever observe. Dawkins expresses concern that: “Irrationality is woven into the fabric of modern life,” whereas, as Hume long ago demonstrated, irrationality is woven into the fabric of science.”

This paragraph is critical, but unclear. What do you mean by “relies on assumed theories that must reach beyond what we can ever observe?”

It seems that no matter how further afield we go from pure logic, such as into Newtonian physics, the question must keep coming back to, how do we know what we know in logic? These truths are not empirically discovered. You don’t figure out whether 2 plus 2 equals 4 by empirical research on cases where two things were added to two other things, and doing a probability analysis of the result. 2 plus 2 equals four by definition.

Now take Pythagoras, clever if somewhat nutty old Greek that he was. You don’t find out whether Pythagoras theorem applies to right-angle triangles by probabilistic empirical research on right-angle triangles. Do you? If the triangle is a right-angle triangle, it applies. And if it doesn’t apply, it’s not a right-angle triangle.

This is the nature of the universal truths from logic which are then applied in scientific methods further removed. But are such logical propositions “assumed theories that must reach beyond what we can ever observe?” If not, then there is no necessary irrationality in scientific method.

This seems to be asking scientists to dumb-down their mathematics to the point where non-specialists ("the public") can understand and evaluate them?
Folks, when you dumb-down science to the point where it becomes comprehendable to people with no maths and no background knowledge, it is not science you are explaining but "lies to children": ie. A simple, understandable and *wrong* idea! This is how most of the myths of science have come about.
Those that have no expertise seem to have problems with this concept: You cannot understand complexity by removing the complexity!
Real science is hard work and has more rigour than most people can comprehend. To really understand it you need maths at a pretty high level and you need to stop reaching for simplistic explanations and delve into details. Once the details are understood you can see what the "lies to children" mean. Starting from the simple wrong version and omitting details will surely lead to misunderstandings. This why peer review is essential.
Dawkins is to be applauded for straight talking and calling it as it is. Religious apologists should really be applying the standards they are asking of science to their own dogma and "leaders"...but that would undermine "faith" wouldn't it?
Science is the only truly humble enterprise humans partake in: the universe is primary, all else is subject to change . This is part of the problem religion has with it. The other part is: science gets it right and makes religion look silly.

Andrew Baker once again trys to dredge up a philosopher from the 1700s to show that science is not rational.

The pretext for this that "it relies, in part, on assumed theories that must reach beyond what we can ever observe".

This would be irrational only if the theory was held to be absolute. Science and scientific methodology has evolved significantly in the past 250 years, partly due to the philosophy of Hume.

In fact today much of the advancement of science hinges around finding the cracks and weaknesses in existing theories so that these can be torn down and replaced with something more resembling reality.

If this logic is turned around and focused on religion, which "relies almost exclusively on assumed theories that must reach beyond what we can ever observe", and with the additional rider that religion holds these theories to be absolute, the inescapable conclusion is that religion is irrational and irredeemably flawed.

Which is roughly what Dawkins was trying to say in the first place.

Andrew - some hard examples of what you meant would have been useful but you basically misunderstood what Dawkins said and have misread current trends.
Assessments of arguments in general are switching to "evidence based" models. So one hears of evidence based medicine where treatments have to be given full double-blind trials, and only used if they actually work. (Surprisingly, this was not fully adopted until recently.) Then there is evidence based aid (as in helping the needy) programs. Don't start a poverty-relief program in Africa until it has been properly assessed. Reason rules.
What Dawkins probably meant was that the theory can be applied to stuff we don't know about it (and we'll apply it when we have some idea of the new area), or that the theory can be applied to areas well outside biology, which it is.. in fact evolutionary theory is always popping up. even in physics.
Scientists should definitely keep to the scientific method, and I wish they would do so more ofte

Richard Dawkins is precluded from behaving as a rational scientist and commentator, by his bloated ego. Like the socalled climate scientists of IPCC ilk, he substitutes assertion for scientific fact. If he is so sure of himself, why cannot he quote irrefutable scientific evidence that proves the theory of evolution? Why cannot he come up with irrefutable scientific evidence that God does not exist? Indeed, why has he not come up with irrefutable scientific evidence that Jesus Christ did not exist?