On 03/13/2013 12:12 PM, Levi Pearson wrote: > On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 11:55 AM, Alan Young<[email protected]> wrote: > Yes, science is continually wrong about things, but the scope of its > wrongness in a given domain tends to narrow over time. > See this essay, where Isaac Asimov makes the point far more > eloquently: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm > > Of course, it's often difficult to see as a layperson just exactly > what the points of uncertainty in a given scientific domain are and > what the confidence levels in 'fairly certain' parts are. We mostly > see science filtered through journalism, which is not generally > equipped to pass those kinds of subtleties on. Sometimes laypeople > think scientists are more certain about things than they are, and > often they think the science is less certain about a particular point > than it actually is. It's hard to know without in-depth study of the > particular domain, and in some cases there's a lot of background noise > from people who don't really know the actual state of the science who > are busy screaming at each other about details of the domain they're > attached to based on how those details fit into their preexisting > belief structure. > > --Levi >
Wow. That looks like a really wordy form of "Hypothesis are like opinions; everyone's got one and they all stink." Though I must say Levi, your version was far more interesting to read than mine. My wife and I were discussing the growing uproar on this subject, and when it was that we each finally realized that science and deity are not mutually exclusive schools of thought. It is my personal view that science is reverse engineering the universe and figuring out how God got things done. I look at our current understanding in the same way as when I tore apart my grandmothers vacuum (to her dismay) when I was 3 or 4. Once I put it all back together again, I better understood the vacuum's operation and related physics; but that still didn't change the fact that I had parts left over. At present, I think we collectively understand a great deal about the universe, but I still think we have a few screws loose. ;-Daniel Fussell /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
