Reply #111: i was referring to such "truths" as the inherent value of a life,

[sojourner]

science doesn't seem to have discovered much about it, yet unless one accepts it as a truth, one may treat lives other than their own as unimportant. Science has long held that infants can't/don't feel pain. For that reason they withheld palliative treatment for babies suffering from terminal illnesses. Only recently have I read that this is changing. At one time I went along with that -- on the say=so of the enlightened and better educated scientists. After having my own children I realized that there are some things that scientists don't know how to measure. Knowing that makes me a skeptical observer of the scientific process. I'm being heard a one who dismisses science. This is not the case. I love the challenge of scientific research - it's downright fun to design and carefully execute a research project. But I am critical of the arrogant stance taken by too many scientists who have convinced themselves that they know all there is to know and that if they can't measure it it doesn't exist.

I'd rather prefer a more modest admission that falsifying a hypothesis in the lab does not amount to proving anythng. Why not? Because simple logic says you cannot prove the negative. Anything dispoved is simply the falsification of a particular hypothesis under particular circumstances.

But you go right ahead and say to yourself that you know all there is to know. Dismiss that which yoiu cannot prove. Just don't try to force that down everyone else's throat. Or like the doctors who "knew" so much about infants you may find yourself dismissing some really important but as yet unproven truths - for example that infants can and do feel pain. Ask any mother.