Science isn't fruitless because it works. It bears fruit, period. That's the point - not whether or not it can prove anything in particular with respect to the laws of nature that it uses.
That still does not answer the question. I am debating about why science works, and you are saying "well, it works." That is like a prisoner who was sentenced to death by firing squad and was having the sentence carried out when, by some freak occurrence, he did not get by a single bullet intended on killing him, telling the reporter who asks "why did you survive" saying "well, I'm here, therefore I must have survived." That isn't answering the question, we are asking the why or how of what we know to have happened. I know proper science works; it is a non-answer to say "it works." I want to know why, given atheistic materialism, I should believe that.
Nice try. It points to a lot more than mere "possibilities" - even some random bum could give his own retarded theory as to how the train crash happens, and these would be "possibilities." The difference is that an investigation which employees scientific knowledge leads to plausible theories which are more than mere possibilities. Do I really need to explain to you why the crash theories put forth by a team of experts in the fields of physics, forensics, engineering, etc, are more likely to be true than the theory put forth by a random bum? Or a theory gleamed from the pages of Revelations?
I meant real possibilities, not some random guess. Science can only determine what are the actual possibilities, not which one of the possible causes is the real cause. We need something more than physical material for that, we need information, and information must come from a mind.
Sure, but eye witnesses accounts are just another form of evidence like video tapes or audio recordings or a burnt-out train, and can be impeached just the same. An eyewitness account is only as strong as the credibility of the witness him or herself.
Exactly.
One way to test the credibility of a witness is to compare their account with physical evidence, and the extent to which there are discrepancies it is reasonable to discount the account of the witness.
In some ways, true, in others, false. If an eyewitness says something demonstrably false based on the other evidence, such as saying that the train was derailed, when it clearly is still on the tracks, can demonstrate that the eyewitness is lying. However, there is no way to know for certain when exactly physical evidence got where it did. If the eyewitness to the wreck said he saw someone dump hot coffee on the engineer, who then knocked some button that caused something to go wrong, there could well be no way of knowing if that happened since it is very possible that there would be nothing left to prove that because the crash caused it to disappear.
Clearly forensic science us intimately connected with "operational" science. I don't see any reason why operation sciences couldn't lead to methods which help determine the age of certain things.
Depending on the time scales, it can. However, when we are talking about unobservable vast spans of thousands, millions, and billions of years, we cannot for at least thousands, millions, and billions more years because it would take that much time to take into account all the variables, correct for them, and determine which methods are even close to correct. Despite that, we can disprove certain methods already using available data. For example, we know that the rocks produced in the Mt. St. Helens eruption in 1980 are, in fact, 30-years-old, yet when tested using radioactive dating methods, they produce dates ranging from hundreds of thousands of years to millions of years old. Also, in that eruption, dozens, if not hundreds, of "annual" varves in different rock layers were created in a matter of hours.
An operational science might involve an experiment with trees, for example, by growing them while recording both their age and the number of rings they produce as measured by samples taken from their cores. This is an easy experiment to repeat, and leads to a pretty strong conclusion that the number of rings in a tree corresponds to the age of the tree. It doesn't seem to involve any "non-empirical philosophy of history" to conclude that the age of a tree with 42 rings is 42 years. That's simply the application of a general theory produced by experimentation and knowledge of the biology of trees as applied to a particular tree.
Yes, it does. Tree rings are known to be non-annual in many circumstances. The reason they are considered annual is because there is, generally, one "ring" for the rapid growing months and another for slower growing months where the tree is attempting to survive. However, it is possible for a climate to experience dramatic weather changes within a season to make many more tree rings in one year than what one would normally expect given "normal" conditions. It takes a dogmatic allegiance to a uniformitarian philosophy of history in order to assert that pretty much any dating method used to estimate large scales of time is accurate. I should note right here that tree rings are analogous to many dating types, particularly ice layer dating (which is basically tree ring dating in reverse).
Grow up.
