Originally posted by Thousand
So if I understand you correctly, you're saying that science is a faith-based belief system because we take for granted the fact that the universe seems to be resting upon several core systems that are readily predictable and measurable? That's an interesting angle.

Originally posted by Thousand
Firstly, the presumption is made that science "started" by dealing with the base functionality of the universe and has made its discoveries outwards from that point, assuming that those core systems are immutable and absolute as it goes. I would argue instead that science started at a much more general, day-to-day level and progressed inwards, eventually discovering that the universe runs on a basic set of human-understandable and mathematically definable systems which are not yet fully understood, but generally accepted to work seeing as we haven't found any cases where they produce different outcomes.

Originally posted by Thousand
The question of whether or not the knowledge of the sun rising every day is faith based is, I think, the result of a misunderstanding. We did not approach the question scientifically from the start. Indeed, the concept of the sun rising and setting once was a faith-based issue, but no longer. While I can't tell you what the sunrise looked like in 15000 BCE, I can explain to you the systems that hold our planet in place around the sun, and the optical illusion caused by our rotation both in place and in orbit around it making it appear as though the sun is rotating around us. We know about these things because intense research has been conducted, and the data gathered has shown us that in 100% of recorded instances, the sun has risen in the morning. We've taken the sun's behavior and obtained a very consistent set of rules from it, rules which hold true in 100% of our observations. Because of this, I can say with honest confidence that the sun will rise tomorrow because that is the way it physically behaves. Is it faith that tells me that this is true, and that the sun will not spin a loop tomorrow morning? No, it is my experience, my observations that tell me that it won't. Saying that I think the sun will rise tomorrow only because I take for granted the fact that it will not rotate backwards doesn't take faith. Holding the belief that the sun may just rotate backwards, even though it has never been observed to have done so...that's faith.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.(1 cor 13:12)

And the other point of note, is that I see this thread is an attempt to discredit science because it is faith based.

The bible admittedly states that the story of our creation was told to Moses by God so assumably future generations would know where they came from. But he was talking to a primative man in Moses, so if I was God in trying to explain to him what I had done, knowing he had no knowledge of science or any of the advancements we now take for granted. I would have had to dumb it down to his level.

Firstly, science is essentially driven by the human desire to understand. It has nothing to do with God unless one chooses to force him upon it.

Secondly, who says we can understand the universe?

The difference between science and religion is the ability to dispassionately accept new evidence, and the passionate unwillingness to do so.

Science is not a religion, atheism and evolution are not faith based. "God of the gaps" arguments and BigWhammy's attempts to lower opponents down to his/her level, fortunately, do not have an effect on real evidence, which science is based on.

I'm going to have to go ahead and say that this little quote is more than a bit sensationalist. The image presented of the Greeks being a people chained to eclectic religious belief which completely overrode all other aspects of their lives, whereas Christianity is the font from which all modern science sprang is more than a bit hard to swallow. Greeks such as Epicurus had already begun laying the foundation for atomic theory in the third century BCE, and Heron of Alexandria constructed the world's first steam engine nearly 2000 years before the industrial revolution in Europe. These were terrifically intelligent people, capable of incredible feats of engineering for their time. Contrast that to the height of Christianity's power during the Dark and Middle ages, when scientific discovery was at an all time low and even the mention of the Earth orbiting the Sun was heretical, and you'll see that the above quote is almost humorously inaccurate. I will give Christianity some things, such as Gregor Mendel (sorry, he was Catholic, which doesn't count), but for the most part it has only given us a backward march towards fundamentalism, driven by the power hungry and fueled by the uneducated (in the case of the Dark Ages, anyway. They weren't called dark because light bulbs were not yet invented)

Kepler, however, was certain, based on his deep Christian faith, that God had employed an even more beautiful pattern, and he labored hard to decipher it. When he discovered what it was—his three laws of planetary motion—he experienced something of a spiritual epiphany. Kepler announced that his laws showed that God had used a far simpler and more elegant scheme than the one previously delineated in the Ptolemaic system of cycles and epicycles. In a prayer concluding The Harmony of the World, Kepler implored God "graciously to cause that these demonstrations may lead to thy glory and to the salvation of souls."

Kepler's laws posit uncanny relationships. For instance, Kepler's third law states that the square of the time of a planet's revolution is proportional to the cube of its mean distance from the sun. How could anyone have figured that out? Kepler did in large part because he was convinced that there had to be a beautiful mathematical relationship there hidden and 66
waiting for him. Part of his Christian vocation was to find it and promulgate it to the greater glory of God. Kepler's success leads to the surprising recognition that religious motivation can sometimes result in breakthrough discoveries that change the course of scientific history.

Gregor Mendel (sorry, he was Catholic, which doesn't count)

Why do science and religion have to conflict. Science and religion use different tools to answer different questions.

But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. (Albert Einstein, 1941)

No, it is not. It is driven by the human desire to understand, period. Again, science only includes "god" if one chooses to force him upon it.

How did Christian belief provide a cultural matrix (womb) for the growth of science?

In Christ and Science (p. 23), Jaki gives four reasons for modern science's unique birth in Christian Western Europe:

1. "Once more the Christian belief in the Creator allowed a break-through in thinking about nature. Only a truly transcendental Creator could be thought of as being powerful enough to create a nature with autonomous laws without his power over nature being thereby diminished. Once the basic among those laws were formulated science could develop on its own terms."
2. "The Christian idea of creation made still another crucially important contribution to the future of science. It consisted in putting all material beings on the same level as being mere creatures. Unlike in the pagan Greek cosmos, there could be no divine bodies in the Christian cosmos. All bodies, heavenly and terrestrial, were now on the same footing, on the same level. this made it eventually possible to assume that the motion of the moon and the fall of a body on earth could be governed by the same law of gravitation. The assumption would have been a sacrilege in the eyes of anyone in the Greek pantheistic tradition, or in any similar tradition in any of the ancient cultures."
3. "Finally, man figured in the Christian dogma of creation as a being specially created in the image of God. This image consisted both in man's rationality as somehow sharing in God's own rationality and in man's condition as an ethical being with eternal responsibility for his actions. Man's reflection on his own rationality had therefore to give him confidence that his created mind could fathom the rationality of the created realm."
4. "At the same time, the very createdness could caution man to guard agains the ever-present temptation to dictate to nature what it ought to be. The eventual rise of the experimental method owes much to that Christian matrix."

As an atheist no I do not. Nor does any other reputable scientist/atheist. Conversely, creationists seem to imply they know everything about the universe: God did it.

The big bang isn't a good example because there really isn't a huge amount of evidence to support it. It is generally accepted because it is the best explanation we now have. Perhaps when the LHC goes online we will gain more understanding, and this hypothesis will be refuted or supported.

Furthermore, creationism literally controlled "scientific" views for several thousand years, until we gained a better explanation. Evolution is by no means "religious dogma" because science isn't a religion.

Several years ago eminent science writer John Maddox published an article in Nature titled "Down with the Big Bang." This is strange language for a scientist to use. Clearly the Big Bang happened, but Maddox gives the impression that he wishes it hadn't. He is not alone. In chapter eleven, I quoted astronomer Arthur Eddington's description of the Big Bang as "repugnant." Eddington confessed his desire to find "a genuine loophole" in order to "allow evolution an infinite time to get started." So one reason for resisting the Big Bang is to make room for the theory of evolution.

Theism provides an explanation for everything. It is entirely faith based.

By that logic we should be able to understand everything. Things previously incomprehensible, for example, electricity, can now be rationally explained, therefore "God" has lost his place in that explanation.

Similarly, there are plenty of things we still do not understand; however, it is reasonable to suggest that we eventually will.

"Secondly, who says we can understand the universe? " As an atheist no I do not. Nor does any other reputable scientist/atheist.

Therefore, things were not "built to understand"; they were "built anyways". The fact that we can apply science to understand them does not offer any evidence or proof that "God" wants us to understand them and therefore is real.

I applaud your research and effort,

but your argument is weak.

Originally posted by Bigwhammy

The father of the ‘scientific method’ was Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) he believed in creationism and he was a Christian. Sir Isaac Newton is responsible for the laws of classical physics was a devout Christian and wrote tirelessly on the Bible. To have science at all one must have faith that nature is decipherable with the human mind. The only reason to presume that it is in fact decipherable, is a common creator.

Think about this... why didn't science and the scientific method occur in the far east. China and Japan invented great things but they never achieved anything like "science". It is because science is born from faith in God. If there is no God that created the universe and man, theres is no reason to believe mans intellect can decipher the laws of nature.

The fathers of science believed in God
• Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) astronomer, mathematics
• Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1627) establishing the scientific method of inquiry
• Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) mathematician and astronomer.
• Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) astronomer.,physics
• Rene Descartes (1596-1650) father of modern philosophy, mathematician, scientist
• Isaac Newton (1642-1727) mathematics,physics,chemistry
• Robert Boyle (1791-1867) chemistry
• Michael Faraday (1791-1867) physics
• Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) genetics

From Dinesh D'Souza Whats So Great About Christianity p.66

I hope you don't see this as an attack (it isn't meant to be) but I wanted to address some chronological/ Miscellaneous problems I see with some of the above, though its largely a matter of debate really but many have noticed that

Roger Bacon was largely inspired by the writings of an earlier Christian theologian (and at one point the Bishop of Lincoln) Roger Grosseteste. Roger G between 1220 to 1235 wrote a bunch of Scientific treatise:

* De sphera. An introductory text on astronomy.

# De luce. On the "metaphysics of light." (which is the most original work of cosmogony in the Latin West)

# De accessu et recessu maris. On tides and tidal movements. (although some scholars dispute his authorship)

# De lineis, angulis et figuris. Mathematical reasoning in the natural sciences.

# De iride. On the rainbow.

You can read more on Roger Grossetest here:

en.wikipedia.org...

Quite a bit of what Roger G wrote about with regards to the foundations of Scientific Method were based on things Aristotle had written Almost a 1000 years earlier. There were some others who wrote/ added to and built on those same things Aristotle had written and who also partly inspired Bacon and maybe even Grossetest and the others around that such as Ibn al-Haytham.

Some links that you might find interesting, that is when your not tired :-)

en.wikipedia.org...

Also the Chinese and other East hemisphere societies did help further science along in the early days. Granted quite a few of their inventions/ findings were rediscoveries/ remakes of things made in Ancient Greece.
But there were clever people who did further Science and Technology of the time pretty well like Zhang Heng, Ma Jun and

en.wikipedia.org...
en.wikipedia.org...

This next link contains a collection of things from Ancient India and China to Hellenic and Egyptian contributions to ancient beginings which is a pretty good read

en.wikipedia.org...


[edit on 10-5-2008 by Marshall Ormus]

[edit on 10-5-2008 by Marshall Ormus]

Originally posted by Rasobasi420
reply to post by Bigwhammy

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Science is only rooted in faith in that religious faith has always been a part of society, as has the desire to explain nature. There are no direct roots. Faith in God is certainly no prerequisite for scientific discovery or observation.

That should be made perfectly clear before that gets out of hand.

But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. (Albert Einstein, 1941)