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To: Fester Chugabrew
Science wants us to make leaps of faith, too. If the validity of every hypothesis were dependent solely upon proved (or even provable!) facts, there would be no such thing as a hypothesis.

The difference is that science is an iterative process: observe, speculate, test, repeat.

Another feature of science is that old theories seldom get proved wrong. They just become special cases of a larger theory that explains more data. For example, the Copernican solar system has many advantages over the earth-centered universe, but didn't really work computationally. In short, it failed a key test. More speculation occurred: orbits are elliptical. This speculation subsumed the sun-centered system and predicted data better.

But why would anything follow an ellipse when everyone knew intuitively that circles are the most natural shape. Enter gravity, and the equations that describe it.

At each step in the way there is a refinement in the explanatory power of the theory, without overturning centuries of observational data. This applies to relativity also. It is a refinement in the theory of gravity that explains extreme cases. Relativity is not needed at all to navigate within our solar system.

Faith is believing without evidence, and regardless of comments to the contrary, the standard interpretation of "Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test," is that you cannot prove or disprove the existence of God, and it is sinful to try.

Science does not deal with why the world is. It deals with how the world is. It is not attempting to prove or disprove the existence of God. It is examining the way things work.

Centuries ago people, including astronomers, took quite literally the statement that the sun rose, traveled overhead, and set, then hurried back to its starting place. There is no internal evidence in the Bible to dispute this interpretation. Now that science has given us a different visual image of what is happening, we can look at the Bible and say, "Oh, that's just a figure of speech." But it wasn't a figure of speech until the discoveries of science forced that interpretation.

The current battle over evolution is the same thing all over again. Science has forced a reevaluation of the way we interpret Genesis. Most people, including most Jews and a lot of churchgoing Christians, have decided we must interpret Genesis as a parable. That does not mean the moral lesson is untrue, but it means that you do not have to assume Genesis is a science textbook.

590 posted on 03/18/2004 8:03:01 AM PST by js1138
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To: js1138; Elsie
Faith is believing without evidence . . .

Perhaps by your definition. But faith cannot exist without evidence of some kind. There must be a proposition before faith can make it's leap. Faith is always based on a propsiton, a hypothesis, if you will. And a hypothesis is normally rooted in the intelligent world - a world that is well-organized and, to my reckoning, real.

. . . the standard interpretation of "Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test," is that you cannot prove or disprove the existence of God, and it is sinful to try.

Now that's a new twist. Use a passage of Scripture that acknowleges the existence of God to cobble up some moral prohibition against proving the existence of God. Do you realize how preposterous your statement is? What? Is Scripture in this case an authoritative source for you?

591 posted on 03/18/2004 9:07:16 AM PST by Fester Chugabrew
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