Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Quote... Science vs. Religion

I stumbled upon this quote that nicely shows why science is different from religion/faith, as addition to an old discussion we had in Bleens. "And physicists such as myself are acutely aware that the reality we observe--matter evolving on the stage of space and time--may have little to do with the reality, if any that's out there. Nevertheless, because observations are all we have, we take them seriously. We choose hard data and the framework of mathematics as our guides, not unrestrained imagination or unrelenting skepicism, and seek the simplest yet most wide-reaching theories capable of explaining and predicting the outcome of today's and future experiments." - Brian Greene "According to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a scientific theory is 'a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.' No amount of validation changes a theory into a law, which is a descriptive generalization about nature. So when scientists talk about the theory of evolution--or the atomic theory or the theory of relativity, for that matter--they are not expressing reservations about its truth. "

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