There is no such thing as science without assumptions. The question is, does the empirical evidence confirm or falsify said assumptions. I have been following the Creation/Evolution debate closely for years, and I can honestly say that I am persuaded that the evidence for creation is far stronger than the evidence for (macro)evolution in virtually all areas of science. But when I make such a claim the evos jump all over me and either call me a liar, or deluded, or both.
“There is no such thing as science without assumptions.”
Your liberal professors have failed you. You’ve picked up a Kantian fallacy somehow from someone, namely, the idea that all science is theory-laden.
Supposedly since all observation requires concepts, we can’t make objective observations because any observation is theory-laden. Since background assumptions are arbitrary, we arrive at theoretical egalitarianism— one theory is just as good as another. So the story goes.
This is just as silly as saying that if I need to join a union in order to make observations in the laboratory, my observations are union-laden. The problem is that we’re confusing temporal priority with epistemic priority. In other words, it isn’t that needing concepts to make observations is false. It is true, and trivially true.
I’m firmly committed to an inductivist philosophy of science— David Stove’s The Rationality of Induction is a great read, along with his Scientific Irrationalism.
Science is about evidence, not assumptions, not ideology, not class, not gender, or any other foolish postmodern lunacy professors peddle these days.