From hunches, partial observations, suggestions from prior research, various other sources of questions about what may or may not be correct that warrants further investigation.
My point is to make you think about bootstrapping the hypothesis issue.
Yes, an intelligent agent will do exactly what you suggested. And by the way, what you said was exactly a hypothesis. What exactly did you do to generate it? Where did that text/ideas come from?
When you come to the bottom of it you'll probably find something that you can't explain. You'll have to think about something and that will lead to something else and so on.
The scientific method is just a means of communicating ideas to other people. But, can you use scientific method on itself? That is, can you communicate a scientific method to generate scientific methods (basically only the hypothesis) for a particular subject? What about "hunches"? Can I have them?
If you can, you hit jackpot. But if you don't, then you might want to think more about discarding the unexplainable.
Go beyond that and try to imagine an 4d or 5d space. Then extrapolate and do a bijection from that to understanding what God is. Why do you think that you can do that? What does this prove about all this thing?
I'm sorry I don't know what you're talking about any more.
You seem to be trying to say that the use of hunches and soft knowledge to form the basis of inquiry and test somehow contradicts or weakens the idea that the world around us can be best understood by the scientific method.
"Hypothesis" is not knowledge, nor are such generated by magic, and they only become knowledge when tested (or contradicted).
As for the last bit, sorry you've degenerated into talking nonsense.
Without hypothesis you don't have scientific method on a particular subject. This is the weakness I was talking about.
Since you can't use scientific method to bootstrap itself - as far as anyone can tell - this is enough to question scientific method's ability to resolve _all_ issues and declare any result on things not applicable to it.
Is this important? You tell me. You may find it useful not to apply unsuitable methods to all situations.
Why does a hypothesis need to be defined by the scientific method? I can pull an idea out of my butt (all grasshoppers are blue!), state it formally as a hypothesis and then apply scientific investigation to it. I don't see this bootstrap problem you're talking about.
Scientific method likely cannot resolve all possible categories of question, no. Empiricism is a fundamental assumption, that things are repeatable and hold true under investigation.
However this is a very different sort of assumption to the rejection of evidence based on faith that is implicit to creationism. One is our best effort to understand the world around us, the other is wilful ignorance.
Why does a hypothesis need to be defined by the scientific method?
Because a thing which you believe and yet is not defined by the scientific method (or rather, empiricism) is known as "faith", a concept which you and the rest of this thread has spent a good deal of energy attacking.
And yet before you test it (if you get around to testing it, and you have the ability and resource to do so), it's just another thing you believe might be the cause of some effect.
In other words, it has no empirical base. It's an idea. A thought, held in the belief that some future action by you or others may prove it correct.
Sure, it's an idea, it's not something you believe anything about though, that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept. A hypothesis is a statement of a possibility to be investigated and either upheld or invalidated. It is in no way equivalent to a belief.
I'm not seeing the substantial difference between those two things, aside from the unrelated-to-my-point variable of how much the idea-holder wants it to be upheld.
That variable certainly exists - it's why we have blind-controlled trials as the gold standard of research.
I don't think a true null hypothesis exists as long as humans are involved in concocting them, the person could want, consciously or subconsciously, any output from any experiment.
Maybe one outcome leads to more research that's a major paint to secure funding for and one is much easier? Maybe the outfit funding the study clearly wants one particular result?
Which goes right back to what I'm saying: humans are not purely logical, true null hypotheses don't exist, and the only difference between a "hypothesis" and a "belief" by what you just described is the degree to which the person with the idea wants a specific outcome - a variable which is completely unrelated to the eventual truthiness or falsity of the output.
The fundamental difference is that a hypothesis is not (or should not be, different argument) accepted as fact by the scientific establishment before it is tested and shown true or false with empirical evidence.
As such it doesn't matter where it comes from so long as it is tested before acceptance. Which is why I struggle to understand the bootstrapping problem that the other poster talks about.
--edit-- To put it as simply as I can muster - why does the origin of the idea to test matter, when it is the testing that's the important part?
But not all things can be tested - think about dual slit experiment. You can't reproduce the experiment in the sense that you'll know which slit will be taken.
But you can reproduce the probability distribution aspect of it quite reliably. If you think the dual slit experiment presents a problem to the scientific method or empiricism you're quite wrong.
--edit-- I can't help feeling we've wandered off-piste here.
The point I was trying to make is that the origin of a hypothesis is not really important, just that before it is accepted as true or false it is tested.
--edit-- this wasn't actually an edit so much as a reply. Oops!
Yes, the origin of hypothesis is irrelevant.
I was using hypothesis origin only as a means to prove that scientific method does not apply to all things.
The underlying issue is that having faith in Empiricism(1) is reasonable but having faith in God is ignorance.
Quoting Hamming: "A man was fishing with a net in the sea. He concluded that there is no smaller fish in the sea than what he caught". (s/fishing net/scientific method)
(1)Empiricism modulo quantum effects - and here we go again.
I'm not sure how that's a weakness?