Sometimes I love it that I am asleep when most of you are awake and vice versa. It makes a more relaxed reading of the posts.

Alex, thanks for responding now to my question. We must have had very different experiences.

Alex, to make it easier for you I had cited the sentence I was criticising at the beginning of my long post. You respond by citing another sentence from your post I had not attacked at all. Had you read sine ira et studio this should have been obvious to you.

In my thinking, when I criticise one sentence from a post it does not imply at all that I disagree with other statements in the same post.

As for the sentence you cite, on the surface of the words I'm more with you than with Naemanson (though I suspect at a deeper level I'd be more with him). As I had already written in the first thread science for me is more than experiments. There are controlled observations (which are sometimes deplorably called 'experiments' in the natural sciences) mathematical models and much more (a theoretical physicist who has never experimented in his life is a scientist for me). The empirical approach (as opposed e.g. to an occult or esoteric approach) is to me what constitutes the scientific method, experiments only being the best controlled and preferable (if possible), but not the only method.

As for Rich's post, my reaction is very similar to kat's (maybe even for the same reasons), but I'd rather not discuss religion.

Wolfgang