tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1129504587589508868.post-26512519436712815292008-02-23T20:51:00.000-04:002008-02-23T20:51:00.000-04:00All in all, a very good commentary on science and religion. Just a quibble or two: First, science is also based on faith. There are certain axiomatic beliefs that underlie science and cannot be tested. For instance, the belief that all that we observe is objectively there and not an illusion. And quantum physic says that just the act of observing something changes it, which gives some scientists the willies. <BR/><BR/>Science also relies on faith in other scientists. That is, scientists trust that whoever they are basing their work on did their work properly and recorded the results accurately. They also have to trust that nobody committed fraud as in the Piltown Man or in the recent Korean scandal over cloning. When that faith is betrayed, years of work must be rethought or abandoned. <BR/><BR/>Secondly, there are different kinds of sciences, depending how hard or soft they are. Hard sciences tend to be math based, like physics. They also focus on phenomena that are measurable, and either frequent or repeatable under lab conditions. <BR/><BR/>But there are sciences (like archeology) that aren't really about experimentation but are mainly about ordering, categorizing, correlating things and making interpretations, which can and are debated by other scientists. Finally, you get to very soft sciences like psychology and sociology, in which findings are quite open to interpretation (recently, it was found that the kids of families that eat dinner together do a lot better. Does eating together make a family less disfunctional or do more functional families tend to eat together?) <BR/><BR/>The sciences are excellent at learning about certain aspects of the universe. But for those aspects that are not measurable, irrepeatable, rare and widely open to interpretation...not so much.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com