erislover’s well-intentioned (but, to me, incomprehensible) attempt at establishing a new epistemology of science aside, I think Logical Phallacy’s proposition falls down on a basic misunderstanding about how science works in comparison to religion.
To wit: Religious belief asserts a priori that it is correct. One begins with God, or the deity/deities of your choice, and constructs a social and moral system from that starting point. If information comes to light that contradicts the faith, then either the information is suppressed or disregarded (or labeled as the misleading work of an anti-deity), or the faith eventually crumbles and dies.
Science, by contrast, asserts a couple of basic axioms – the universe can be perceived rationally; the accumulation of information is the only reasonable means of testing hypotheses; the behavior of the universe is consistent, such that the repeated testing of hypotheses can be predicted to yield consistent results; and so on. And then, based on these, you basically have at it. Anything is fair game; any bit of received knowledge is open to disproof, using these methods. Given enough evidence, even the fundamental underpinnings of a body of thought can be erased and redrawn, as happened with Einstein and relativity, or Wegener and tectonic drift, or any number of other examples.
That’s the basic difference: Religion assumes infallibility; science makes no such assumption.
But what about the axioms, you demand? Well, if you reject the basic scientific axioms, then you posit a universe that behaves irrationally and inconsistently, and whose physical interactions cannot be predicted with any confidence. Trouble is, all the available evidence contradicts this view. As Mort Furd points out, the very computer you used to write your thesis and are now using to read my words is a counterexample to this worldview. The computer is an amazing technological achievement, building on discovery after discovery in an easily traced history. If science didn’t work, then the odds of having randomly invented a functional computer out of whole cloth, and more importantly mass-producing computers that we can all use in more or less the same manner, are quite long indeed.
Certainly, there’s room for philosophical debate in terms of the meta-scientific-methodological validation of science itself by means of repetition and reinforcement. Perhaps that’s even what erislover is driving at, some sort of Gödelian proposition that any proof of science that uses a scientific approach is by definition fatally flawed, and that therefore the scientific method remains ipso facto unproven in some Platonic sense. Perhaps there’s even some merit to that argument.
To me, though, it seems, on a purely commonsense level, that the record of scientific discovery stands as its own best advocate. Thousands and thousands of people every day use the methods of science to say, “Based on what we know, this and this ought to result in that. <later> And whaddaya know, it does.” This has given us everything from compact discs to contact lenses, from superconductors to the Heimlich maneuver.
And yes, it’s absolutely true that the Average Joe is becoming ever more disconnected from the methods by which your “handy-dandy gadgets” are created, and yes, it’s further true that scientific exploration has given us just as many dangerous temptations (e.g. weaponized anthrax) as it has purely positive creations (e.g. penicillin). Neither of these criticisms, however, has anything whatever to do with the fundamental validity of the scientific method as a means of examining and understanding our universe.
