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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 7250312" data-attributes="member: 6683613">It's a little premature to abandon the scientific method when you can ask questions like, "What caused the change in causes?" Say a wizard did it. Okay. How does the wizard decide what to do? Does he maybe have interests, desires, psychological motives of some sort? Can we start to make predictions like "The wizard is angry, so he's going to spontaneously detonate something"? Or maybe it's something else. Say it's totally random. Okay. Can we quantify the randomness? Make predictions at a probabilistic level, like "This rock has a 0.5% chance of spontaneously detonating over the next year"?A scientific approach doesn't require causality to be consistent any more than it requires all data to be consistent. When there's an inconsistency, that's scientifically interesting.It kind of can, actually. Science is about observing and recording what works. So if there is some hypothetical tool out there that works better than science, science is going to say, "Okay, the scientific thing to do here is use that tool." No tool can be better than science because whatever the best tool is becomes science. (This is a paraphrase of the Pragmatic Resolution to Hume's Problem of Induction, for the philosophy nerds out there.)</blockquote>