That we consider hard lines of matter to delineate what something is only another example of the relative truth that humanity chooses to deem as absolute. The concept of a "chunk," "matter," and a "space" around it are entirely human concepts and creations. The idea of something being "unique" is also a human concept which reflects how we"separate" objects according to our severely limited visual and interpretation abilities. The fact that named it means everything - we call something because we separated that piece of matter from the surrounding molecules around it based on an arbitrary criteria that is relevant in our context, not out of a sense of truth. The sun doesn't exist for everyone and everything - do other animals delineate what they see in the sky into planets, stars, asteroids? No. We created these separate concepts from our own relative observations and methods of discriminating properties of what we define as this organization of matter as we view it through our extremely narrow range of vision and resolution.
I don't even know how else to explain this to you. Look it doesn't matter how we cut it up, it doesn't matter what we name things, all that is skirting the issue. If a bug or a human or anybody takes off towards the sun will they or will they not get burned up (assuming this flying object is flamable)? Is that universal? If so then it doesn't matter whether we call it the sun or whether we call it Fredrick. It doesn't matter whether we think of the sun as its own object or whether we think of the volume around the sun as part of the sun or whether we think of just the core as being the sun, it doesn't matter at all. What matters is that there are bodies there (bodies being a term meaning basically "things") and that those bodies have properties that are independant of the observer. Meaning once I get close to the sun I cannot control whether or not I get burned up. It is the sun that burns me up. The sun burns me up no matter what I call it and no matter how I describe its properties or no matter how I conceptualize it or combine it with other things. That right there is a universal fact. If you disagree with this then you must believe that people, or bugs, or things can control whether or not they get burned up when flying towards the area that we call the sun. Do you believe this? Ok, so that's point one.
Here's point two. In fact this is an entirely seperate argument since our little debate about the sun doesn't actually address the issue of universal truth. This one does. There are many truths which are not even observeable that can be shown to be universal (for evidence of this idea see my arguments in the sections below). Since you didn't address these issues the first time around I will now have to repeat myself. Take the statement "all events have a cause". Show me how this is not a universal truth. And please don't do it by picking apart the works "event" or "cause". Think of the pure concepts. How about, "a line is the shortest distance between two points". Please demonstrate for me a situation in which this is not the case. Once again, of course I can conceptualize a situation in which a line was instead called a "grippler" or something like that and in that case the shortest point between two lines is a grippler and not a line. That is not at all what I'm asking you to do. I am talking about the concept of a line and the concept of two points. Man may have put words to these things but that doesn't mean we invented them.
The scientific method:
"The essential elements[9][10][11] of a scientific method[12] are iterations,[13][14] recursions,[15] interleavings, and orderings of the following:
* Characterizations (observations,[16] definitions, and measurements of the subject of inquiry)
* Hypotheses[17][18] (theoretical, hypothetical explanations of observations and measurements of the subject)[19]
* Predictions (reasoning including logical deduction[20] from the hypothesis or theory)
* Experiments[21] (tests of all of the above)
"
http://en.wikipedia....ientific_method
I'm not sure why you included this. It seems like you were worried that my argument was too weak so you decided to support it further by providing evidence for the points I was trying to make. I've bolded and enlargened the critical part of what you posted. Correct me if I'm wrong but you were arguing that the heisenberg uncertainty principle guarentees that we can not observe something without also affecting it so all facts from observation are relative. I then pointed out that there are facts that can be known without observation and so the heisenberg uncertainty principle doesn't negate all universe truth. Then you basically said, "stfu u don't no scienz its all obsrvtn!!!!". Then, without my prompting, you posted the above and proved yourself wrong. Thank you.
So we see that the scientific method is about observation in the light of deductive reasoning. Experiments cannot be designed nor can their results be interpreted without it. Deductive reasoning is a critical part of how we explore our world and our acceptance of it as a valid way of knowing truth is implicit in the way we conduct scientific experiments. Inductive reasoning comes in to play when applying your results to a larger population. For instance if you give hemlock to 2,000,000 rabbits and they all die, then it is inductive reasoning that allows you to conclude, "hemlock kills rabbits". Assuming your experiments were properly controlled of course. So, since your whole beef with reasoning being valid seemed to be that it wasn't part of the scientific method, now we can hopefully put this silly portion of the argument to rest. Deductive reasoning is a valid way of discerning truth.
This is important because it means that if we can come to a universal truth that is not based on observation at all then your argument does nothing to invalidate its universality. Points of that nature include the "cause" and "line" statements I made in the section above.
We can directly observe electrons -
"The first video images of an electron were captured by a team at Lund University in Sweden in February 2008. To capture this event, the scientists used extremely short flashes of light. To produce this light, newly developed technology for generating short pulses from intense laser light, called attosecond pulses, allowed the team at the university’s Faculty of Engineering to capture the electron's motion for the first time.
"It takes about 150 attoseconds for an electron to circle the nucleus of an atom. An attosecond is related to a second as a second is related to the age of the universe," explained Johan Mauritsson, an assistant professor in atomic physics at the Faculty of Engineering, Lund University."
http://en.wikipedia....s#Visualisation
And the double helix of DNA was made AFTER the first X-ray diffractions of the molecule by Watson and Crick and earlier scientists, not before.
http://en.wikipedia....of_DNA_research
Scientists do not know happen during the Universe's (the thing we define as "the universe") first seconds - they openly admit that it is only a theory and not a fact. The theory resulted from decades of direct observations of an expanding universe which must have been much smaller according to the current laws of physics and time - it is not a fact and can never be tested.
And here you are vainly attempted to support your bizarre thesis that science involves no reasoning and only observation. Have we observed electron clouds forming sp1, sp2, or sp3 orbitals? No. Yet we know their shape based on mathematics (a science of nearly pure deduction by the way). And we can perform chemical reactions that at times depend on these specific orbital shapes and they work according to our predictions, thus demonstrating that our orbital shapes are correct. Yet they have never been directly observed.
And you once again proved my point with the example about Watson and Crick. Is x-ray deffraction a method of direct observation? Not at all. Did the diffraction pattern show them the shape of the molecule? No. From the patterns derived from refraction they were able to deduce the shape of the DNA molecule. They took data and figured out what the shape had to be to have given that result. That is deduction not observation.
What about evolution? Do you believe in it? No one has observed evolution. I don't think its possible in a strict sense. But we have observed bones. We have observed measurements changing in different generations of birds and rats. We have observed the results of genetic tests that show patterns and trends from which we have deduced the principles of evolution and natural selection. There are numerous, numerous examples. You can't seriously argue that science is based on pure observation without deduction or induction. If you still don't believe deduction is necessary, you may not fully understand what deduction is.
But this is all ancillary to the point. Now that we're all informed about the basics of science we can actually talk about universal truth. In fact, I would be thrilled if in your next post you could address the validity of universal truths derived from pure deduction. I would love to debate someone on that topic.