Check out the next post in my “Reason as a Guide to Reality” series over at Wheat and Tares. Here is a preview:

To prove his point of view, Deutsch suggests a thought experiment. Pretend that aliens give us poor humans a magic box, an ‘oracle’ so to speak, that can “predict the outcome of any possible experiment, but provides no explanations.” (The Fabric of Reality, p. 4)  In theory this should be a Positivist’s dream. Since we only care about the predictive power of science, we now no longer need science because we can literally predict anything.