The evolution of an atheist.

This is mostly correct. I'm not so sure about that, though. I think it is more a matter that if philosophy cannot account for science, then philosophy obviously fails. So they need philosophy of science to protect them from embarrassment, even though the account of science it provides is mostly bogus.

If Hume "realized" that, then Hume was mistaken. What was dodgy, was the account of knowledge given by philosophy. That was another Hume mistake. Science does not depend on the kind of induction that Hume criticized. Can you actually document any cases in science that have depended on such induction? If Popper had not "done his thing", scientists would have just found another philosopher whom they have never read (much as they have never read Popper), but who is reputed to have made a pithy statement that they could quote when trying to debunk pseudo-science. Most quantum physicists just press on regardless, without worrying about whether philosophers can make sense of it all. What does "real" even mean? What matters is that quantum physics makes good and useful predictions. If you don't think it is real, you can always go with the kind of anti-realism adopted by Bas van Fraassen. Honestly, it doesn't matter. Those all work. Science is a pragmatic enterprise, not a truth seeking enterprise. Penrose allowed himself to be "carried away" by philosophy, and he came out with nonsense.

You will have to explain that to me.Normally, "affirming the consequent" refers to an error in deductive logic. But what you quoted does not look like deductive logic. Rather, it looks like the description of an experimental method, including a claim that the method was repeated many times giving highly consistent results.I have no idea what was the context of that quote, so I am not clear on what was being measured. It is my understanding that Einstein thought the eclipse was very weak supporting evidence. It the theory correctly predicted the orbit of Mercury, that would have been considered stronger evidence.In any case, scientific theories are never proved. They are adopted, or rejected on pragmatic grounds. It's a mistake to treat them as if they were propositions that had a truth value. Most physical scientists are skeptical of a lot of psychology, not just Freud's work. I assume that crashfrog is among the skeptics.Sure, I readily admit that many psychologists actually do read the philosophy literature, and actually do try to practice science as described by philosophy of science. That's perhaps part of why psychology often seems such a weak science. I hate that kind of argument.The word "philosophy" is used in several ways. In a narrow sense, it refers to the kind of work done by professional philosophers, and what they publish in their books and research journals. But there is also a broader sense of the word, in which all humans can be said to engage in philosophy. It is pretty obvious that crashfrog was criticizing philosophy in the first narrower sense. So now you try to move the goalposts to the second and broader sense.

What's to defend? You were not being attacked.If you can accept that many scientists are not as enamored of philosophy as you are, then we can just leave the issue at that, and get back to discussing other things.Honestly, this is your thread. And if you found ideas from philosophy to be important to you, that's fine. It's just that some of us don't see the same importance in them.

However, I cannot even think of what proposition that might be.

You replied to me, but mostly quoted crashfrog.I'll hold off responding for a while, in case you decide to start a new thread with it.If you do start a new thread, I think it could actually be a fairly non-contentious discussion over different views of the relation between science and philosophy.

While that might be true, it seems irrelevant.Somebody can be an atheist because they find the case for theism to be unpersuasive. They do not need a case for atheism.

I agree with that. My point is that someone can be an atheist without needing a case to be made.

Now that you put it that way, I recognize Hank as a Nigerian 419 scammer.

You should perhaps consider the possibility that perhaps GDR does not mean what you took him to mean there.

I agree that it is up to GDR, to explain what he means. However, it is far from clear as to what people mean when they use the term "objective" (see thread Objective reality).