| appolose said: Science doesn't really work, anyway. You can't prove anything with it, you can't even claim it can give a good guess. You can never prove that you're not hallucinating, or being manipulated by some sinister force. And you can't say that it's indicative of anything because you would be using science to demonstrate that, which would be circular. I'm not even sure if methods of truth exist, or if the idea makes any sense at all. |
Paraphrasing you:
"Religion doesn't really work, anyway. You can't prove anything with it, you can't even claim it can give a good guess. You can never prove that you're not hallucinating, or that you are being manipulated by some sinister force. And you can't say that it's indicative of anything because you would be using religion to demonstrate that, which would be circular. I'm not even sure if methods of truth exist, or if the idea makes any sense at all."
The difference is most (all?) religion relies on you accepting a number of tenets that theoretically cannot be changed as they are supposed to be the perfect word of a perfect creator (at least for abrahamic religions) whereas science does its best to limit the number of tenets you need to believe and allows you to challenge each and every one of them iff you have good evidence to do so: i.e. you can't just say the earth is flat or evolution didn't happen when all the evidence indicates that it is round and that some kind of evolutionary process is occurring; though not necessarily in the exact form being theorised in today's science as further data might invalidate some of it.
Hell, even Newton's theory of gravity could and would be challenged if people started to float up in the air without changing morphology (not evolving bags of air to make us like human balloons) and without assistance from technology.
Oh, wait, newton's theory of gravity WAS challenged by Einstein and shown partially incorrect and gave rise to the theory of general relativity. This didn't make Newton's theory wholly wrong or useless but it refined it to give us a better understanding of the universe. It is unlikely that further discoveries in this field will totally invalidate either theories due to the amount of evidence backing them up but who knows, maybe further refinements will add to them in a similar fashion.
The same is true for the theory of evolution. There is enough evidence for us to be sure that it occurred in the past and is occuring now but like the theory of gravity it probably will need to be modified as we understand how things happen(ed) better (it was already modified a lot since Darwin, especially with genetics which confirmed it where it could have just as easily destroyed it).
So when I have the choice of believing something that rely on total faith with no proof of it possible I prefer to be sceptic. When offered to believe something that seeks to explains things to me and whose fruits I enjoy daily (even as I type this post) I choose to believe it as far as it has proven itself and when it offers new theories I choose to be sceptical of them until the amount of evidence of their favour and my understanding of them it enough to overcome said scepticism, hence why I still don't believe in cold fusion (even though I would love for it to be true).
"I do not suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it"
