The New Science™ compared to science as it always was up to 2020

@ArishMell This item is not against true science. It is against scientific dictatorship. As in "The Science is settled" - a total non-sequitur.

@ArishMell what utter tripe. Without the church there would be no science. See Issac Newton for example.

@hippyjoe1955 Why? Not tripe at all. The Church of Rome was so anti-learning it even forbade translating the Bible into national languages for a long time!

Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, etc did not advance science because they went to church on Sundays, though they did see themselves as trying to work what God had actually done rather than what some contemporary priest was parroting from some ancient priest He had. In fact in Galileo's time the last thing the Church wanted was science! The Pope did grudgingly accept Galileo might have a point as long as it stayed quiet opinion, but Galileo was not very diplomatic and soon fell out with the Sanctimonius Ones. The Church of Rome then took about 400 years to admit its historical injustice.

When Mediaeval European Christianity was languishing in wilful Church-led ignorance, the early Muslim world was continuing the pre-Hebrew, pre-Christian traditions of study by the Ancient Greeks and the Babylonians, and similarly in the Asian civilisations that also had their own gods.

The Hebrews do not appear to have been against learning for its own sake but probably saw no point in it. Or more likely, it was a luxury out of reach of a small, late Bronze-Age, society just emerging from a largely-nomadic, tribal, post-Zoroastrian culture. Apocryphally, they included good craftsmen but had not even twigged the nature of "pi"!

And even now, especially in the USA, sadly we see fringe amateur churches campaigning hard against science, or at least any knowledge that opposes their hard-line dogma. I do though, suspect their motives are beyond the childish, pure Bible v. science division they claim.

The modern established churches have grown up and embrace science generally. Even the Vatican has an astronomical observatory!

However, science itself does not worry itself about religions and churches anyway. It is not concerned with mysticism but is secular and ecumenical; embracing followers of all faiths and none; and has to be because it is largely international in nature.

@ArishMell so why have so many advancement in the sciences occurred in areas where Christianity is the dominant religion?

@hippyjoe1955 Co-incidence largely, or at any rate social influences; and it did not develop until the established Church in Europe grew up, only about 300 years ago. The Ancient Greeks and the Chinese, the early Muslims and a few other ancient civilisations were well ahead in their time, and none of them were Christian.

@ArishMell no there is a huge correlation and only the Christian haters deny it. The fact is that the basis of science as we know it comes from the idea that God is a rational Being and we need only to look for His thoughts in the design. A friend of mine does medical research. She said that her investigation of cancer causes and cures has improved when she abandoned the idea of evolution and started to look for design.

@hippyjoe1955 I see your point, though I don't know what your "Christian haters" bit is about.

I think there is something else going on though. The organised Christian institutions actively suppressed study and learning for hundreds of years, emerging from that only about 300-400 years ago. Nowadays, science progresses around the world irrespective of religious creeds. So what happened in between?

I agree the early natural-scientists were looking at Nature as God's work, and sometimes tied themselves in knots trying to keep their findings aligned with church dogma rather than asking if perhaps the dogma was wrong.

For example, one of the earliest works on the then-new science of geology was William Buckland's Reliquae Diluvinae - relics of the Noah flood. Attempts to maintain a geocentric universe to keep priests happy, led to inventing some extraordinary orbital geometry to explain observed planetary motion.

I think instead it was not religion that led to science flowering, if anything the opposite as learning emerged from Church dictatorship; but the Christian countries being among the most affluent and keen to learn. It started with the Renaissance in the arts and learning, was encouraged by the Reformation and breaking of the Vatican's centuries-old monopoly; then fertilised more by the European countries becoming rich on expanding their empires and trade.

They did not stop being Christian, but became far less ready to accept being told what to think by an increasingly static Church.

Then along came the Industrial Revolution, which rapidly demanded Science to expand fields like Physics and Chemistry, with immediately practical applications.

I mentioned previously the early Islamic flowering of science and medicine - there is a parallel here because the Islamic view was that finding and using Knowledge to the good service of Man is itself serving God. The 18C-19C physicists starting to understand mathematics, materials and machines might not have gone that far, but most of them still went to church on Sunday - if only by social expectation.


As for your medical friend, I can see a Christian attributing cells and their abnormalities to God's work, or "design" if you like. It's really a statement of the obvious if you believe God brought life into being, and does not need fancy titles. I can't see though that it excuses a fringe-religious, dogmatic denial of a vast field of Science merely for not being way described in the Bible - which does not seek to explain how anyway.

Does pi = 3.00000000... as stated in an insignificant sentence in the Bible?
Are Ohm's Law and Young's Modulus lies because they are not are in the Bible?
Had we better ban the Internet 'cos Moses didn't have it?

@ArishMell so says the man who denies science because The Science says otherwise. Science is not an arbiter of anything. As my old physics professor said. "Science never proves. At best it indicates". Iow if you are not questioning what you are being told you are not engaging in Science

@hippyjoe1955 Good science progresses by asking question by repeating tests and observations, etc., and although it may be personally painful at times for individuals, being ready to change or even reject hypotheses or theories as methods improve and new evidence appears.

That's one of its difference from religions and some politics, especially those that rely on dutiful obedience of dogma in place of thinking and questioning.

@ArishMell science is a religion.

@hippyjoe1955 In what respect? T

They are hardly the same on the surface, Even beyond the matter of science wanting evidence from real things and supernatural deity-worship wanting only belief; they ask totally different things.

Scientists are only human and they can sometimes be entrenched in their own hypotheses (no-one likes to be found wrong!), religions of various types have all encouraged hard-line dogma that must never be questioned.

So where is the comparison rather than contrast?

Note that I name no religion. All the deist faiths are much the same at heart: a belief in supernatural entities.

@ArishMell they are exactly the same. Both demand unquestioning allegiance. Both claim to be the arbiters if truth. Both both claim to be utterly trust worthy.

@hippyjoe1955 They do not.

Religion demands an unquestioning belief in its deities with no evidence; even if its followers bicker over how to worship them or what it scriptures mean.

Science works by consensus and questioning and test; and wants testable evidence. It might sometimes cling to an idea that later proves wrong as methods and evidence improve, but a religion would refuse to test the original belief no matter how absurd it later seems. Those running many religions, including cults, even stoop to actively opposing any questioning or knowledge not meeting the dogma.

A lot of it boils down to the natural human tendencies to dislike having cherished beliefs questioned especially from outside; and to difficulty accepting something distant from what seems obvious.

The mechanism of Plate Tectonics was a classic example. For long, Geologists thought that the continents could not possibly move - they called them the "rigid masses" - and they howled Alfred Wegener down when he postulated it. After all, what could a mere meteorologist know about rocks and how the planet works? Then as oceanography and seismology developed, they found the evidence showing the "rigid masses" do move, and and all of a sudden it all made sense. The nature of the planet's surface became clear, and it explains folding, faulting, mountains, earthquakes and volcanoes that had all puzzled geologists previously. Wegener had been basically correct although having no means to investigate it his idea could only be a hypothesis; but he had hit two problems:

- The accepted wisdom thanks to it being humanly difficult to conceive that gigantic slabs of land can slide around the globe

- He was a scientist but of the "wrong" sort, the wrong herd; and humans are herd animals by instinct.

Another, much more recent, was so-called "Cold Fusion". Excited by this possibility, physicists in many countries rightly tried to repeat the claimed experiment, and it failed every time. Whatever its originator had done, he had made a big and very embarassing mistake.

If Rigid Masses and Cold Fusion were controlled by religion in the conventional sense, no-one would be allowed to show them mistaken. The Religious Herd would say continents cannot move because we have always said so, and we can't see them move anyway. (The Her would find it very convenient that naturally we can't see it with our own eyes anyway, at mean speeds of only 20-25mm/yr and the edges of the continents being out under the sea!) While if Cold Fusion was claimed it would be set as unquestionably "right" and not to be examined; as once thought of Noah's Ark, the Turin Shroud and Lourdes "miracles".

Deist faiths "work" by being impossible, lacking all testable evidence, either to verify nor refute! They are literally acts of belief, true only to their own followers although usually sincere. They are not open to test because they are purely personal opinions in something not objectively testable, however widely shared. The most you can do is tinker with their scriptural interpretations and liturgies. If allowed, of course.

@ArishMell science demands an unshakable belief in itself

@hippyjoe1955 Science depends in an unshakable belief in scientific method, and that needs being keen to observe, to measure, to question, to test, to re-evaluate and if necessary modify, what we know.

Religion depends in an unshakable belief in its basic idea, and with no testing, questioning or modifying, apart from sometimes rejecting fringe myths and dogma so out-dated they are just ridiculous and self-defeating.

Also they ask very different questions anyway so there needs be no conflict. This also means no need for peurile attempts to warp one to fit the other, as with that so-called "intelligent design".

Either you believe in some deity driving the Universe or you don't, but Nature carries on regardless and Science tries to find out how it does, not by or for whom!

@ArishMell science is a religion that believes it has all the answers thanks to our rational mind

@hippyjoe1955 No genuine scientist believes Science has all the answers. If they did it would barely have progressed since the Age of Enlightenment.

More likely that infallibility belief is the one held by people who do not understand science and scientific method - so that is most politicians, journalists, many business people and even today, a few religious cultists.

It's that, not Science itself, that led to much of the popular 20C belief that we can solve all of the world's problems if we only "tame" or "harness" Nature by lots and lots of Science and Engineering.

No - Science and Engineering can and certainly has benefitted us, and still will do so; but it needs proper understanding and application of them by policy-makers and commerce to have any chance of solving everything even if that is possible.

@ArishMell and there is a big rock candy mountain.

@hippyjoe1955 Is there? Oh, and here's me thinking that was the subject of a silly song for patronising children...

Just admit - you despise science yet drive about in a big van and use the Internet.....