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To: Hank Kerchief
Superstition and faith are not necessarily the same thing.
Science involves no superstition, but it does involve a heaping helping of faith. Faith that all of "reality" can be divined by humans by way of the scientifici method. Many of our greatest scientists (such as Einstein) recognized the folly of such "faith" in science to devine all knowledge.
58 posted on 09/09/2003 11:17:30 AM PDT by Lorianne
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To: Lorianne
Superstition and faith are not necessarily the same thing

He-he . . .in all cases they will be if you're a meanie. I was on a thread the other day where religion was the same thing as mental illness. Such equations make the title of this thread quite apropos.

59 posted on 09/09/2003 11:20:00 AM PDT by cornelis
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To: Lorianne
Superstition and faith are not necessarily the same thing. Science involves no superstition, but it does involve a heaping helping of faith. Faith that all of "reality" can be divined by humans by way of the scientifici method. Many of our greatest scientists (such as Einstein) recognized the folly of such "faith" in science to devine all knowledge.

First of all, science is not like religion. There is no accepted authority in science that makes declarations like, "we believe all of reality can be divined by humans by way of the scientific method." Science is a method for discovering the truth about certain aspects of reality, namely, material or physical existense and its nature. The other view of science is the body of knowledge thus far discovered by that method. There is no version of science that is an attempt (or has any expectation or desire) to "divine all knowldge," or, as a matter of fact, even most of it.

Science is only one branch of intellectual inquirey. There is also philosophy, and history, and mathematics which is a sort-of sub-category of both science and philosophy. There are the arts and the greatest body of knoweldge of all, technology.

Where the idea came from that some people believe science is going to answer all human quesions I cannot imagine. As you point out, even Einstein was duped by this impression and felt compelled to comment on it. (A genius, true, but he couldn't tie is own shoes. Oh well.)

There is no "faith" in science, only observation. The objects of science existed before science, which only discovered them. There are some things some scientist would like to learn, if possible, that help understand how all the different characteristics of material existence can be integrated into a single explanatory concept or collection of concepts. There is no "faith" that this will be accomplished, only the steadily increasing impression, from what has already been learned, that such a "unifying" theory is possible, and maybe even likely. If it is accomplished, there will still be infinitely more things yet to be learned, even in the science, as any scientist will tell you.

Hank

79 posted on 09/09/2003 2:25:09 PM PDT by Hank Kerchief
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