RE: Scientific Knowledge? If there is no God?
September 6, 2011 at 2:07 pm
(This post was last modified: September 6, 2011 at 2:56 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(September 6, 2011 at 12:41 pm)QuestingHound08 Wrote: I'm curious--since our science extrapolates (on a type of human faith) that the world we see is objectively measurable and understandable, and that our minds are equipped to know it not only instinctively, but speculatively...doesn't our entire system of Science kind of presuppose an ordered universe, with something faintly like a person ordering it (since it's intelligible to other persons)?
No, it does not. What it does do is to find what order there really is to be discovered, then apply that order more generally to see if it results in what is to be expected, while remaining vigilant to any evidence that would suggest any specific inapplicability. Thus over time science build up and continuously refine a systematic catalogue, for the want of better vocabulary, of exactly which orders there are, and where and how those orders apply, and whether certain order is merely a reflection of more fundamental order like multiplication is but a series of additions.
So science does not pressuppose an ordered universe. Science discovered the universe has order, and some of the orders discovered does not exhibit known convincing evidence for inapplicability anywhere we've thus been able to look. So science disovered an ordered universe.
For example, science does not presuppose conservation of energy. Science has discovered conservation of energy nearby where we can test that assumption to satisfactory detail, and has not discovered that applying conservation of energy more broadly to the rest of the universe would bring about clear and unavoidable contradition of what we can observe to be there.