Scientific anti-realism and science-bashing

A redated post.

According to anti-realists in the philosophy of science. 

... a theory should never be regarded as truth...Proponents believe that science is full of theories that are proved incorrect, and that the majority of theories ultimately are rejected or refined. Great theories, such as Newton’s laws, have been proved incorrect.

That sounds like science-bashing to me, doesn't it? But, do scientists take umbrage? No,

This is the attitude of most scientists; they try to ignore the debate and let the philosophers decide the fine details about the nature of reality! 

Nice of them to leave us philosophers with some work to do.

Actually, if you were a complete scientific anti-realist, the whole creation-evolution issue wouldn't even arise.

Omphalos and scientific realism

A redated post.

This is an interesting discussion of Gosse's Omphalos. Can a Darwinist be a Christian? Heck, a Darwinist can be a six-day creationist. Just not a scientific creationist.

What an Omphalos creationists has to maintain is that while creationism is true, our best science is evolution. (So no challenging what they teach in public school classrooms. That has to be our best science, whether it is true or not.

In other words a Darwinian creationist (Darwinist about our best science,
Creationist about the truths) has to deny is the doctrine of scientific realism, which is defined in this discussion from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

It is easier to define scientific realism than it is to identify its role as a distinctly philosophical doctrine. Scientific realists hold that the characteristic product of successful scientific research is knowledge of largely theory-independent phenomena and that such knowledge is possible (indeed actual) even in those cases in which the relevant phenomena are not, in any non-question-begging sense, observable. According to scientific realists, for example, if you obtain a good contemporary chemistry textbook you will have good reason to believe (because the scientists whose work the book reports had good scientific evidence for) the (approximate) truth of the claims it contains about the existence and properties of atoms, molecules, sub-atomic particles, energy levels, reaction mechanisms, etc. Moreover, you have good reason to think that such phenomena have the properties attributed to them in the textbook independently of our theoretical conceptions in chemistry. Scientific realism is thus the common sense (or common science) conception that, subject to a recognition that scientific methods are fallible and that most scientific knowledge is approximate, we are justified in accepting the most secure findings of scientists "at face value."
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/

Gosse gets a bad rap from people like Bertrand Russell. But he was one of the outstanding biologists of his time. Would a contemporary biology department refuse to hire him because he was not a realist about his evolutionism?

NOMA and the realist interpretation of evolutionary biology

NOMA is an attractive idea. However, it seems to be an essential part of what evolutionary biologists are saying that there was no involvement in the process by God or any other supernatural beings. One could avoid this problem is to say that evolution is a model, and the best scientific model we've come up wtih so far. We can study the science without believing it to be literally true. In other sciences, scientists will present their views as theories without insisting that they are literally true. Rather, they say it's the best way to make sense of the data from a scientific standpoint. Physicists like Hawking say this sort of thing a lot. Evolutionary biologists, on the other hand, seem to expect people to be realists about their theory. I wonder why?

The guy in Holy Grail says, of Camelot, "It's only a model."

Koons' argument that naturalism is incompatible with scientific reallism