(September 11, 2014 at 9:55 pm)sswhateverlove Wrote: So, you're saying you do continue in pursuit of knowledge that could possibly confirm an intelligent designer/influencing variable? If you do that's good. A lot of atheists I know do not.And I'm guessing that a lot of theists you know, do. That's just confirmation bias, which is one of the ways our minds happen to work. The scientific method is designed to deal with confirmation bias by requiring that scientists make their work (inlcuding tests and testing methods) available to other scientists, who can then put their work to additional testing.
Scientists are, generally, simply looking to learn more about how the world works. I think that a good number of them were searching for god when they made discoveries that led to alternative explanations for how certain things worked. Galileo wasn't seeking to conform to popular opinion, that much is for sure! If continued research and discovery and experimentation eventually turn up a god, then that's great! We'll all know she is (or was) out there and left sufficient evidence for her existence to be verified.
But science should not look for god or look to not find god. It just needs to continue to observe, experiment, document, test, and learn.
"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