Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to That's quite true

'religious' aspects of science are very limited
Daniel — (archived)

making assumptions in science is essential for moving forward, and arriving at greater things. The connections and deductions are always (in maths at least) rigorously defined and applied .. the assumptions themselves can be the tricky part, normally they are 'reasonable' assumptions in any normative sense, meaning from the point of view of human physical experience. But the 'assumptions part' of science is what the creationists focus on, since any assumption involves a certain amount of faith. It's a reasonable for us to extroplate time as we know it into geological time, and it's reasonable for us to assume that the time rate hasn't changed over that period (significantly, anyway). And we know our model of radioactivity works, we know the carbon atom, so it's reasonable to assume carbon dating, or our measurement techniques, aren't playing tricks on us beyond the date 5700 BC or so. - So, we deduce (correctly) that the age of the Earth is some several billion years.

But the creationists still zoom in on our assumptions as that's still where an element of faith lives .. for us to assume anything, even reasonable, involves a certain faith. That's about how far we can go though, in attributing 'religious' aspects to science.

Sure there are always the high-flyer media junkies or 'priest' types - the famous science writers who are/were also practising scientists (usually academics) - but that's a social phenomenon and doesn't have to reflect on the intrinsic nature of science.

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