(April 1, 2014 at 11:04 am)Kitanetos Wrote: To be perfectly clear, and honest, scientists in general are not attempting to make a claim one way or another in reference to the validity of religion. It is not their job to prove or disprove god so much as it is their job to discover the origin, for lack of a better term first cause, of the universe. It is a fact that science does not have all the answers to all the questions put forth by humanity, though that is not to state science will never discover an answer to any particular question in the future.I think the simplest way to put it is that science was developed as a method of learning about the world around us. It proved to be more useful than the "take a wild guess" method that humans had used until then, which is likely the method that birthed the first religion. The scientific method of discovery has proven so useful that humans keep applying it to pretty much any question they can think of, and it's got a pretty good track record, such that the "take a wild guess" and "pull an explanation out of your ass" methods have been left by the wayside. Except, of course, as a way of keeping god on life support for the last few centuries.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould