One puts the hypothesis (Call it hypothesis H1) that "there exists a force of attraction between every two masses". One obtains a high degree of belief in this hypothesis by testing it experimentally several times. Even though there exists objects which were not tested for gravity (I believe objects faraway from earth, perhaps in other galaxies were not tested to see if they satisfy the claim H1), I think it is commonly believed that H1 holds. So to summarize, every object in the universe was either tested for gravity and gave a positive result for the hypothesis H1 or is not known whether it satisfies the hypothesis H1 or not (because possibly it is not feasible to do that).
One puts the hypothesis (Call it hypothesis H2) "every object was created". Some people obtain high belief in this statement by observing that many sophisticated objects were created by humans or perhaps sometimes other animals. People who claim hypothesis H2 will not be able determine the status of every object in the universe i.e. they will not be able to determine for every object whether it was created or not. So to Summarize, every object in the universe was either known to be created or is not known whether it satisfies the hypothesis H2 or not (because possibly it is not feasible to do that).
It appears to me that situations 1,2 are the same. Question 1: Do you agree ?
Yet, people wouldn't consider situation 2 scientific. It seems to me that the two are equally scientific (Yet I wouldn't consider situation 2 scientific, I am in fact confused). Question 2: Why is this the case ? Is it because I am having a wrong understanding of what scientific means ?
I just had an uncivil discussion :) with someone discussing the above two questions. I will put a list of some of the possible objections that arised during the discussion along with my reply to each objection.
Objection 1: Scientists believe in the assumption (Call this assumption A1) that the universe behaves the same way in all places (very vague in my opinion and could lead to contradictions). Using this assumption, we deduce that even masses that are far away from earth will behave like masses that were tested on earth.
Reply 1: The same applies to situation 2. All objects which we can determine whether they were created or not we find out that they were created using assumption A1 we are led to the believe in hypothesis H2
Objection 2: Created is vague. Define Created.
Reply 2: I will not be able to define all words I use, since that would lead to an infinite sequence of definitions and words but the set of English words is finite. Instead of doing that I will use certain words as atomic (meaning I will not give definitions for them). These words will be the building blocks for language. I will define every word using atomic words. I will also set the word "create" to be atomic. The same thing happens in situation 1, the words force/attraction if undefined will be treated atomically. Even if they will be defined, I believe any good definition would use the words "motion" or "displacement" and they most likely will be treated atomically.
Objection 3: Hypothesis 1 is falsifiable, Hypothesis 2 is not. This is because one can make an experiment where an object is let go and we observe the direction where it travels.
Reply 3: One can also get an object in our world and ask the question whether it was created or not
I would like to have a good non-artifical definition of "scientific reasoning" that will make situation 1 scientific but will make situation 2 non scientific. I can't come up with such a definition, can you come up with one ?