| Joelcool7 said:
Now some say that their belief is more then faith, that they have cold hard scientific facts. But lets look at Science has Science over the last few thousand years stayed consistant? Scientists taught Alchemy was that fact? Scientists taught that the world was flat was that right? Scientists taught many different theories of evolution concluding all theories had some flaws and taking bits and peices from different theories to create the modern theory. Most recently I watched on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) a segment. The segment said that we are 4% genetically related to Neanderthals. Infact we have more genetically in common with Pigs and Chimpanzees. The segment said that it would be hard to say we were related to the Neanderthals and that text books may have to be re-written.I graduated a few years ago and in school was taught that we evolved directly from Neanderthals. That Neanderthals were our ancestors.Then only a few years later I find out, yah we have more incommon genetically with Pigs. Science evolves and without faith you can't actually believe any scientific theology. Who knows a hundred years from now we could be looking at Evolution the same way we did when the world realized the Earth wasn't flat. |
I'm sorry, but I have to answer this because shows a slight misunderstanding about the scientific method.
Science is the ever lasting search for the laws that govern nature. We will never be 100% correct, but we will always be ever improving . Whenever I hear this kind of view of science I'm always reminded of Isaac Asimov's essay 'The relativity of wrong', in which he explains how science is always an ongoing quest, and our understanding will never shrink and will always grow. The example he used is the one you cited, the shape of the Earth. I'll give you a quick ruin through of it.
Thousands of years ago, before the ancient Greeks the committee was out on the shape of the Earth, some thought flat, some thought spherical, some even though pear shaped. But it wasn't until we realised that a pole in the ground in the north will have a different length shadow to one in the south cast at mid day. This allowed us to determine that the Earth was spherical as we could work out the Angle between the two points. We later leaned through observations of other worlds and then our own that the Earth wasn't spherical, but oblate spheroidal. When we developed satellite technology we could measure the Earth extremely accurately and we found that it was also ever so slightly pear shaped. We now understand the shape of the Earth better than when some thought it was flat, and tomorrow we will not suddenly find out it has been flat or cube shaped all along.
Our knowledge of the shape of the Earth has never regressed, it has only increased. And this is how science works. No scientist worth his salt will ever decree their field complete. No evolutionary biologist will ever say "well that's it, we understand everything about evolution", they will only ever say "we understand more than we did yesterday".
And yes, sometimes science can get it wrong, but the scientific method is geared towards finding out what is wrong and correct it. After centuries of maturity we are now finding that we understand things to the point where we can be very sure we're in the right area. The sheer volume of evidence for evolution is so astonishing that we can be sure that evolution does occur; however there are still many questions evolutionary biologists have to ask about various mechanisms and causes, but in general we know we're right. We know that tomorrow we wont find a piece of evidence that disproves the thousands of observations we have made so far.
With evolution we are always increasing the knowledge we have on the subject and we are always adapting the theory to be ever more correct. You claim that in 100 years we could look back on it like a flat Earth. Not so. The point we're at in evolution is the same point we were at when we found out that the Earth was oblate spheroidal. We're not right, but we're very nearly right and we can be certain that tomorrow we wont find out that the Earth is a cube or that the origin of species was down to a God.
The bottom line is after a field has developed properly over a few centuries (or perhaps even decades) our certainty in it being correct grows. Incorrect theories often don't last for very long, where as correct ones last indefinitely.
