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Paranormal Investigations and Belief in Ghosts
Esther Schindler writes "Sure, everyone uses technology on the job. But you may not have contemplated the tools used by paranormal investigators (at least, not until you began thinking about Halloween) who look for the truth in ghosts and other things that go Bump in the Night. In Paranormal Investigations and Technology: Where Ghosts and Gadgets Meet, CIO's Al Sacco writes about the most unusual of tool chests, with everything from thermometers to blimp cams." You want spooky? An anonymous reader passed a link to a survey that says a third of Americans believe in ghosts. Who you gonna call?
First Ghost!
captcha: fainted
Years ago a fellow I knew took to hanging out in graveyards with his camera and film sensitive to Infra Red (pick up the background IR, except where spirits, which apparently suck the energy out of their surroundings when they manifest themselves.) He claimed to have taken actual photos of ghosts hanging about graves, including some which were posessed. He offered to show me some of his work, but I wasn't in a mood for it as my Grandmum had recently passed away.
So here's this bloke:
Auerbach, on the other hand, strongly feels that ghosts and specters cannot be photographed. "If they could be, people would've already," Auerbach says. So this fellow with pictures was fiddling the film?I do believe in spooks! I do, I do, I do believe in spooks! Oh, sod, who was it then?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
... ghosts are bullshit!
...so what's the big deal? Ever read "The Bible" or other associated works? They're full of as much fantastic nonsense as any ghost-spotting con artist could ever dream up.
More than that believed Saddam was behind 9/11 - it's not about people being stupid it's about effective storytelling and PR making people believe stupid things. See the "Amityville Horror" for a leading example. One of the major players (M. O'Gara ) in spinning that story to the public ended up spinning the story about SCO that people will be familiar with here.
I thought that 70% of Americans are religious. All religious people believe in ghosts. It would be great if only 30% of Americans were so gullible.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Don't cross the streams. That would be bad.
Have gnu, will travel.
Not knocking the religious, just saying that 1/3 of Americans believing in the supernatural should not surprise anyone.
nothing.can.stop.me.now
Dr. Michael Persinger can give people the experience of seeing god by manipulating the field around their head.
http://ladyscientist.com/the_ghost_in_the_machine.html
There is evidence that ghosts appear in regions with high electrostatic fields. The fields are often/usually the result of the piezo-electric effect of rock under pressure, ie in mountain regions. The other thing that will give people the willies is sub-sonic vibrations.
I think trying to find ghosts is the wrong idea. These guys should be looking for the things that make people see ghosts.
Scully: "So now we're chasing ghosts?"
Mulder: "Who you gonna call?"
Well, 92% of americans believe in God, so, boy I wonder if there is something wrong with those polls or if America REALLY is in so bad intellectual shape (to express myself nice)...
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
People using science and tools to try and explain things that are currently unknown or understood? I don't think that is too spooky. True the second article is about people and their beliefs, but I don't really find it that strange.
Sig it.
that God does not exist? How do you know you aren't wrong?
Nobody has proof that God does not exist. Because you can't prove a negative.
Just as you don't have any proof that The Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean you've been TBHNA.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
While pejorative in tone, this is essentially true. There's little practical difference between ghosts, angels, demons, and gods, other than how much power they have and their moral alignment. If you find any of them plausible, there's no reason you shouldn't believe in them all, other than peer pressure and social convention.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Science can't prove that ANYTHING doesn't exist... I mean, science can't prove that giant pink whistling bears don't exist... so while you ARE indeed correct, it is -no more- a faith statement than saying "Giant pink whistling bears don't exist". The burden of proof lies on the side of people asserting something non-obvious is true/valid/exists/whatever, not the other way around, and it has little to do with it being about god or anything else.
People had to prove that the earth was round, because with my own two eyes, without knowing which signs to look for (even though in this day and age they are extremely obvious, but weren't always so), it looks flat. Therefore, its flat until someone proves its not. Someone proved it wasn't, therefore it isn't, until someone proves otherwise, and so on. No faith about it, its a methodology. Saying "there is no god!" is just short for "There is no solid evidence there is a god, thus by applying the commonly accepted scientific methodologies, we can say there is no god until proven otherwise". Thats just a bit long to say everytime, and people with scientific background, or who follows in standard science footstep just shortens, since they'll understand each other.
Then there are the morons who think they understand what science is but don't, and don't quite get that EVERYTHING in science is "theories until a better theory comes up", and use the words the wrong way. Can't help those.
I mean, now science says the earth is round. Sometime in the future we most likely will prove something similar to string theory (or some such), and realise that there were obvious signs around us that after all, earth isn't round, its in 1 dimention and our one dimentional human brain just interprete that 1 dimention as a sphere based on other inputs. Then scientists of the time will make jokes about "lol the earth is round rofl!". But we know that. Thats as opposed to people asserting something is true as if it was a fact, without evidence. There's a freagin big difference between "it doesn't exist until you prove it does", and "it exists until you prove it doesn't".
Obviously, there's enough evidence out there that needs to be confirmed or debunked (depending on your point of view) that centers for paranormal research are justified.
Now there's nothing a good academic center likes more than funding - I think we can all agree on that. So, why haven't they taken Randi's One Million Dollars from him to buy more Aeron chairs?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"Then, of course, there is faith in science itself."
Science is a method, it requires no faith. In fact it is a method through which provides it's own falsifiable test of itself.
No faith needed.
"Everyone has something they believe in that they can't prove," unless taken to an absurd level, that is not true.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Are angels in the same class as ghosts?
Yes. Superstition comes in many forms.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What is there more evidence of...ghosts, or neutrinos?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
How exactly are origins not part of science? If you want to know how a system originated, you might carefully study its current state and the manner in which it develops over time, and thereby attempt to deduce by reason the state it would have occupied in the past. Or alternatively you might invoke God. One of these approaches is science, the other is not.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
They're not making a faith statement, reread my post for a sec. They're shortening an idea thats FREAGIN DARN LONG to write as a whole in a post on the internet, because other "science people" understand that its just a short.
There definately ARE some people that will say there is no god as a faith statement, and that IS equaly as rediculous, I completly agree with that. But when a scientist says "There is no god", that is NOT what they mean. Again, keep in mind: "There is no god" is equaly as valid or invalid as "There is no flying spaghetti monster". It does NOT mean "its impossible for it to be a god". It means "there's no reason for me to think there is a god, therefore I don't waste my time with it". Just shorter.
Again, let me repeat to be clear since my last post obviously didn't make that obvious: When a scientist says there is no god, it does not mean what you seem to think it does. Don't take it so literally. Do you know the difference between thinking something, and beleiving something? Both have to do with uncertainties. But there's a huge difference between the two.
I saw a British documentary recently about an investigation of a haunted house. In particular, the house had one room where just about anyone who had slept there reported hearing a child screaming, and a sudden uneasy feeling. This was traditionally attributed to the ghost of a child who had died in the room. One paranormal investigator surveyed the room and found out that the mattress coils in the 200+ year old bed was made of highly magnetised material. He was able to show that the magnetic fields were so strong as to be capable of generating hallucinatory states in anyone sleeping on the bed. So this was one instance where I thought that investigation of the reports led to an interesting scientific finding. Dismissing the reports of hauntings as pure nonsense wouldn't have taught us much, neither would have accepting the reports at face value.
Hey, atheists would have us believe in a bunch of secular stupidity as well. This mystical belief is at the heart of the environmental movement, and its utterly ridiculous. First and foremost is this notion that if we are nice to the earth, the earth will be mean to us. The earth is a fricking rock. It has no brain. You can't make deals with it.
This seems like a rather stupid argument, unless I'm missing something.
The earth is our environment. We live in it. If we don't treat it right, it won't treat us right; is has nothing to do with deals or brains, it's just simple physics and biology.
Would you take a shit on your dinner plate and eat it? Of course not. You'd get sick. Would you eat toxic wastes? Of course not; you'd get sick, and probable die. Polluting the earth is the same thing, only in smaller concentrations, and usually the concentrations are higher around people with less money. The toxins make people sick, and they die sometimes. These toxins don't just stay where we put them; as humans, we're dependent on air and water, which come from the earth. Pollute the air, and you're going to breathe it. Pollute the water, and you're going to drink it (at least water can be filtered; no one walks around with gas masks on, yet). Even worse, the food grown in fields for us to eat uses air and water. It's all a big cycle, so if you screw with it, it's going to come back and bite you in the ass most likely.
There's nothing mystical about this, and any idiot should be able understand it. Anyone who thinks it's ok to just pollute willy-nilly is either completely selfish (only cares about short-term consequences and not long-term), astoundingly stupid, or has some irrational belief that it won't affect them and others.
Then, of course, there is faith in science itself. It is an act of faith...
This is a rather stupid statement. Science doesn't require any faith at all; it's just a method for gaining knowledge where models are created and tested using evidence, and thrown out if contradicted by evidence. Do you have a better method?
I just finished college, and I am currently (until the 10 Nov.) on a bit of a hiatus from doing any work that remotely requires the use of my brain. For the past couple months I have been working at a small breakfast cafe that operates out of a house built around 1900.
As old as the house is, it has slightly unnerving properties: the floors creak, drafts blow napkins and receipts, etc.. I find it very easy to come up with reasonable naturalistic explanations for what my co-workers consider paranormal. All of the servers at this restaurant believe that it is inhabited by a ghost -- one that interacts with the world we experience. A poltergeist.
Most also believe in astrology and homeopathy. One server recently paid ~ $15 for a chalk tablet cold remedy. No matter how hard I try to dispel these harmful beliefs, I am (ironically) met with skepticism. For instance, today someone told me that they believed in symbols foretelling the future. I suggested that any notion of psychic ability is likely due to confirmation bias -- we are more likely to remember when our intuition was correct than when it had failed us. I also told this person about the JREF/Randi Prize.
At this point in most of my conversations with my mystically inclined associates, some "scientific explanation" is offered dealing with photons, leptons, "we're all made of light," and other new-agey pseudo-quantum-physics.
I am at the point where I have almost given up, except to always ask people to examine how they know what they proclaim to know without resorting to their feelings. I find it very hard to not come across as condescending when having these conversations.
It's the quantum!
Listening to the skeptics guide to the universe podcast. It has helped me learn how to deal with these people and how to bring them back to reality.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
You might understand it's a TV show, you just seem to misunderstand what the fact it's a TV show means. Simply put, they will lie to make more interesting TV.
(There is nothing particularly supreme about any of the Greek, Nordic or Celtic "Gods", for example. Nor were they ascribed unique ownership of any segment of worldly affairs. As best as I can tell, such views seem to originate more with the Semitic peoples and it is largely Judeo-Christian anthropologists who attach such views to others.)
Without a clear, meaningful definition of what it is a person is rejecting, it makes no sense to talk about rejecting it, because what you are rejecting, what others think you are rejecting and what you think you are rejecting are not going to be the same except by chance alone. However, this gets interesting in the case of anything which, by definition, transcends that which can be defined. It's like asking a computer to solve a non-computable problem. If a computer could solve it, it would not be non-computable.
The easiest way to handle this case is to simply place it into the category of "unknowable", along with all of the things that science has firmly and definitively shown to be unknowable. If you add two unknowables together, you still end up with an unknowable, so it really doesn't matter which of the unknowables are real and which aren't. At least, from any kind of scientific perspective.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...and I believe the other poster's point was this:
While science has some really interesting guesses about the origins of the universe, as does religion, the simple fact remains that they're BOTH guesses. True, it's more systematic with science. However, most real agnostics and atheists I know will admit it's a guess either way, and as a Christian I need to honestly admit the same.
Folks, I'm with Jubal Harshaw on this:
"Come Judgement Day, if they hold it, we may find that Mumbo JumboDon't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
For months I saw something that seemed to be a person moving just at the edge of my vision, on rare occasion, usually late at night when I was alone reading a book. But when I got up to look carefully, no one was there, or could possibly have been there.
Ghosts!
Or...maybe not. I went to the optometrist for my regular check-up, and she found a bunch of "floaters" in my eye. If I look at a blank wall, I can see them sometimes, they drift in and out of my field of view, and if I look steadily, the optic system edits them out and they vanish.
So, of course, when it was late at night and I was already tired, and moved my eyes after staring at something steadily (the book) a floater would sometimes wander into view briefly, and I'd "see" a moving shadow for a second or two.
Not really. If an angel enters this world and his an errand for God to carry out, it takes a physical form. If you meet an angel, you should very easily be able to test its reality.
A lot of universities have "academic" football programs too, but...
False dichotomy, asshole. Some people understand real morality, instead of the childish behavior of trying to avoid a spanking from an imaginary Daddy In The Sky.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Morality is about the way things ought to be, and a "moral wrong" is a situation where things are not as they ought to be. This does create a dilemma for people who are both moral realists and strict physicalists (denying that there is anything other than the material realm). The problem is this: if you're a physicalist/materialist, then all real truths are truths about physical things -- about the way things are. Any statement about the way things ought to be can not be a real truth or falsehood, since there is nothing real to which it refers. A genuine physicalist can't consistently make absolute claims about morality for this reason. That's not to say that they can't be moral actors, but their moral code is necessarily fictitious because strict physicalism is incompatible with non-physical realities such as real morality. Physicalism is incompatible with moral realism.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
What makes you think that you have to have a supernatural to have morality? Or are you saying that you need a belief in the supernatural to have morality? If this is the case, why are atheists so under represented in prison population statistics?
The smarter home exchange, http://switchhomes.net
Do YOU have no sense of right or wrong?
:(
Where does spirituality come into play here? Does your spiritually guided, moral compass tell you that killing someone is wrong without question - or - is killing someone who will be responsible for the deaths of millions morally acceptable? Does it tell you that you should love your parents unconditionally - or - should you stop loving them if they are responsible for heinous abuse, neglect or even murder??? Where do you draw the line? Do these things suddenly become moral or immoral based on some sort of invisible, cosmological line drawn between wrong and right?
Exactly
where in your spiritual text book does it explain you to you, word for word, what is absolutely morally right or unquestionably morally wrong? Is it 'instilled' inside of you? Does that mean you always make the right, moral decisions? If so, it must be nice to be you...
And I guess can no other living being make a moral decision without spirituality? When dolphins care for their injured or sick, is this not a moral decision? When animals such as dogs and walruses 'adopt' animals of other species and take care of them even though there's nothing to gain, is that not a moral decision?
It's hard to believe you summarized the entire multi-verse up in two categories - "immoral" and "spiritual". If spirituality is solely responsible morality, then nothing could have been immoral without it, no? You can't have good without evil and you can't have immorality without morality. It makes me sad that people have such a narrow vision.
If there's a universal right and wrong, then human beings don't know what the Hell they are doing.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
There's a big difference between faith and the recognition that a particular method is the most pragmatic and reliable method available.
Nice try though.
When you "prove a negative" in mathematics you are merely disproving the (positive) opposite of your assertion, for every possible situation. The entire proof/disproof thing is based on induction and absurdity, and there is always a set of axioms you must begin with, because they make the process ultimately feasible. In math/logic, most negative statements *can* be proved, or else they can be disproved, because the axioms are very simple, conventional truths.
The physical world is more complex, where negative and positive statements, derived from previous mathematical and physical truths, are possible, but novel proposals about reality are only "positive" in nature. Empirical evidence is used to provide inductive backing for positive statements *only*. When you say the earth is not flat, the negative statement is proved by combining mathematical axioms with physical observations that result in absurdity. Of course, you can also prove that the earth is in fact round, but that is another matter, for you are then proving a positive statement (which then can be used as a logical disproof for flatness claims).
But lets say you want to talk about an isolated particle z, claiming that it exists. You need to first provide either theoretical or empirical evidence. The theoretical is uninteresing..it is just a consequence of information that already exists, so it's a simple math exercise. You are only novel when you add to theory/information by offering an observation (I saw a trail in a cloud chamber). You defend your statement by proving a few negative statements via mathematics, like "it is not particle a or b which we already know because that leads to conclusion x, which is absurd". Your proofs of the negatives are simply a reduction to absurdity of the other possibilities, leaving only YOUR possibility (new particle) standing. But if you hadn't observed the particle somehow in the FIRST PLACE, then you cannot even begin. We have nothing to talk about. Hence in the real world, you are bound to begin - no matter how distant that beginning is- with reality, and reality is what you observe. The physical axioms are true not because of convention but because you observe something in the world around you that you believe you can formulate into an undefeatable truth, and you hold it undefeated.
Having said this, you cannot actually disprove proposed physical statements about the world: you can only knock down the "proofs" for them. You cannot disprove "the earth is flat" or "a particle a exists that has property b".... You cannot disprove because you do not need to. The increase in information offered by each of those statements is the step that needs to be justified, because it is adding something to our dear list of truths, and that justification is what needs to stand the test of our skepticism.
God (ghosts..etc) is physics - in terms of information: God is an addition, a new thing, a proposal, an increase in entropy. If you observe things that lead to belief in his existence, then all the other possibilities leading to your observations must be eliminated(as in the particle case above), and of course this is not possible because science is hard to eliminate. Hence you cannot prove God. You cannot defeat the logical skepticism.
And you do not need to disprove him either, because there is nothing to disprove. He is not a logical product of predicates nor is he a tangible object of study, he is a proposed reality that cannot be linked to anything at all. So why should we worry about him? I was at one time religious, I still feel the instinctive pull, the psychological comfort and evolved appreciation in my human cognition of the universe's beauty and order. But if there was a God, he has left us in logical confusion. We have no reason to be worried about the promises that come from the mouths of ancient people, long dead, much less their threats.
The atheist doesn't want to prove anything about otherworldy things. The atheist's request is merely to be left alone.
>>Science is a method, it requires no faith. In fact it is a method through which provides it's own falsifiable test of itself.
Slow down there, cowboy. Nothing proves itself -- you always start with a certain set of axioms.
While it is indeed one of the great tools for knowing things that we have, it is certainly not the only way things become known. We can learn certain things through reason alone (such as math), and many things can only be learned through word of mouth (Sally said that Harry said that...). Statistics is one of the fundamental answers to epistemology (how can I know something), but ultimately we only can learn things at certain (not very high) confidence levels. While a p-value of 0.05 or 0.01 might sound pretty impressive (and are the standard rules of thumb for statistical 'proofs'), they represent 1-out-of-20 and 1-out-of-100 studies' results being nothing more than the result of random chance. If you have, say, 10,000 papers published a year, 500 or 100 of them will be wrong.
Given how often scientific answers have indeed been found to be wrong, especially in epidemiological studies (which is a sort of scientific wishful thinking), it hardly proves itself to be true (which can't be done anyway). A better way of putting it is, "It's the best method we have of figuring out empirical truths about nature."
There are very major limits on science and the scientific method. Notably:
1) Singular events. Science can't handle singular events very well, or not at all. For example, suppose the people that claimed they had seen cold fusion back in '89 really did see Cold Fusion. Perhaps a gamma ray hit something at just the right time, or maybe it required high altitude, or something. But when researchers tried to duplicate it, they couldn't and so the guys were branded as frauds. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't... but they could actually have made an honest empirical observation, and then branded as frauds as a result of it.
2) Trust. The motto of the Royal Society is "Nullis in Verba" ("On the words of no one") In other words, don't believe what people say, but only trust in reproducible experiments. The trouble with this is, of course, that no one can come close to reproducing all of the empirical experiments needed for a full understanding of modern science, and so it always boils down to trusting what other people say. If a car full of scientists drove through a mountain pass and saw a white substance outside, they could send one of their members out to report if it was sand or snow... without accomplishing anything. The friend could be playing a practical joke on them, after all. All of them would need to go outside and make an empirical observation of the substance themselves in order to be satisfied. This is a very fundamental flaw in the system, which only works since malicious papers (as far as I know) are not inserted into the literature like viruses.
3) The old induction problem / uncertainty. Science is based on inductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning from empirical events can't actually prove anything. We can make certain claims, but not proofs in the sense that logical or mathematical statements can be proven true. "The sun will rise tomorrow" is a scientific claim, but it cannot be proven to be true. The fundamental problem is that what is true in the past might not be true in the future. Since certain things like universal constants are likely to stay the same (though some have theorized they have not in the past!), it can be answered by simply stipulating "If things stay like they are now..." but this is still not the same level of proof as people deal with in logic and math. All scientific knowledge, ultimately, is uncertain.
4) Heretics. The heretics of science have always received rough treatment. Most of the time it is deserved (there are a lot of nutcases out there), but sometimes people have followed the scientific method but had their papers rejected because the reviewers assume their preconceived conclusion. The guys
How, exactly? Certainly the idea that the creator of the Universe would manifest as spaghetti is pretty implausible, but is that inherently more weird than manifesting as an Iron Age carpenter? Who went on to get killed and then come back from the dead so that he could forgive everyone for something that happened four thousand years previously, except that it probably never actually happened at all?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Frankly, sunshine: people like you whose morality depends on belief in a fantasy make me rather nervous. If the only thing that keeps you from going on a murderous rampage is the idea that some ultimate dictator will kick your ass if you do, then you're not someone I would choose for a neighbor.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Science does guess. That's the scientific method. Guess, and then see how well your guess conforms with observation. It is the nature of induction. It doesn't deduce anything directly from observation. Furthermore, science can say nothing about the actual origin of the universe, or its cause; it can only form conclusions about the things that happened immediately after the origin.
First of all, all denominations of Christianity, as well as Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism, acknowledge that the one infinite, timeless God created all of nature and humanity. There is no disagreement whatsoever on that point. There is observable proof of God, and of God's influence, which is why these religions have so many adherents. However, it is internal rather than external proof. It cannot be measured by machines or even quantified, so it is outside the reach of science.
I stated that science makes no such guess - it's still working on the answer, but has some observations as to what's occurred.
That's the thesis that I am arguing against. I say that there are scientists or at least people that speak for it, who argue that science does KNOW, as in factually, how the universe was made and how we evolved. They cross in their minds a preponderance of evidence based largely on internal consistency with a faith that the fabric of physics has been constant and unchanged over the life of the universe. It is faith, it is unprovable, and that's the point... until you actually say you went back in time and saw the universe born, or talked to someone who was there, you haven't really proved a thing. The essence of true science is roof requires witness, get it?
In other words, what really differentiates science from mysticism is the idea that you can do something, and show it to somebody else, by doing the same thing again. You can't show someone else your little angel, but you can show someone vinegar and baking soda fizzing when you mix them. But now, some would have us believe that you don't have to witness to have science, and really, that's simply not true. Evolution, creation physics, all of that, IS NOT SCIENCE. Period. It's a good story, for sure, and to some extent, based on the evidence of what we have, is interesting, but, until you can say that you've seen the universe born or the first step of man yourself, and can show someone else, than, you don't have much more than Noah... its a cool story. Yes, evolution fits together well, and, you could probably walk into a court and slam the Creator down as guilty of it, but, there's that nagging issue of witness that must cause us to say that, we will never, ever, ever, really KNOW. No witness, no proof, and no proof, no science. It's really very simple. Anything else is faith.
This is my sig.
I don't disagree with all of your points, but I disagree with the conclusion you seem to be drawing. You state all these things that you call limitations of science and the scientific method, but as a practicing scientist, I see them more as fundamental limitations of reality. In other words, I believe that science (in its ideal form) is not only the best method we've found so far, but the best method there could possibly be.
1. It's true that experiments are bad at dealing with rare events (I'm generalizing your statement by substituting rare for singular). The challenge, as a scientist, is to come up with a situation where you can study the same underlying phenomena in a system or regime where those rare events become more common. It's true that there are situations where this can be difficult or impossible, but saying that's a limitation of the scientific method is somewhat trivial. Science is dependent on observation, and you're saying that it doesn't work when you can't observe something. More on that below...
2. Trust is less of a problem in science than any other human activity because science builds cumulatively on science done before. Despite what you suggest, direct reproduction is actually not even close to being the primary mechanism for validating past results. The truth is that new experiments are based on models constrained by old experiments, even if the new experiment is not a direct duplication of the old experiment. For example, your computer wouldn't work if all those experiments on electrons and whatever done in the 1950s were wrong. So old results, at least the ones that matter, are tested and retested every day as the findings are incorporated into the models.
3. You seem to imply that it's possible to "prove" things in the real world, but I would argue that it simply is not, through science or any other method. You can prove things in math because math is all made up. Sevens don't actually "exist." Those of us who operate in reality don't have it quite so easy. The type of "proof" you're talking about is not only impossible, but more importantly, completely unnecessary. We risk our lives every day wearing shoes we can't prove won't explode, using keyboards we can't prove won't electrocute us, confident that gravity will not fail us and fling us off the face of the earth. The level of certainty science can provide is sufficient.
4. It is simply untrue that "heretics have always received rough treatment" in science. Look at Einstein, the most famous scientist of the 20th Century. Your example of the discovery of the role of H. pylori is more an indictment of the medical establishment, which at the time was very dogma-driven and insufficiently scientific in its thought (and remains so today). Also, those guys eventually won the Nobel, if you forget--hardly the Galileo treatment.
I think the biggest problem with your understanding of science is that you seem to think that the sole activity of science is in providing "facts" and studying "events." I would argue that the main activity of science is in creating models based on observations, then refining those models. You make a lot of the idea that science rejects unique events, but I would argue that the very idea of truly unique events is fundamentally incompatible with the model of the universe that science has provided (i.e. we're all made out of the same atoms, those atoms all move around according to the same rules, etc.). Science seeks not to collect random facts, but to discover the general underlying principles of reality (which you refer to as "the natural world," as if to imply there is another).
The parent didn't really imply that science proves itself. The parent stated that science provides a way to disprove itself. Those are two very different things.
If the parent meant to differentiate between articles of faith and axioms, that is correct to do so. Axioms are not articles of religious faith. You can tell this, in part, because articles of faith almost never qualify as axioms. Axioms allow for the construction of logical arguments and systems; articles of religious faith rarely if ever do. Just look at religious systems. They inevitably derive more articles of faith from an initial article of faith, and often not in a way that exhibits systemic consistency. This is not to belittle faith by any means; faith can and often does confer emotional comfort and subsequent stability that has real world benefits. It is also often a vehicle for social support as well - not an inconsequential thing at all.
Is seems to me that science says a lot about empirical observations of the natural world. Doesn't it address the nature of those it addresses? Aren't those often starting points for formulations of theories which attempt to explain the observations, or am I missing your point?
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Then I'll be impressed!
Engineering is the art of compromise.