Reply To: Why do you believe in Science?

Veltz,

The point of my OP was to point out that there is a logical fallacy at the heart of scientific knowledge but that we don’t question that assumption because we share it as well, not because it makes sense logically.

Belief in science is not purely utilitarian. Belief in technology is purely utilitarian. It makes no difference to the bridge you drive over whether or not Newtonian physics is correct, what makes a difference is that the bridge stays up.

Science examines and makes statements about life, the universe and everything, including many things that are not utilitarian at all. And yet we still teach those things to our children and believe them ourselves. For example, prior to the proposal of the big bang theory, the scientific model of the universe was that matter was eternal and the universe infinitely large. That this was wrong did not make the technology developed under the assumption of the old model stop working.

Currently science holds of the Copernican Principle (that the Earth is not in a central, specially favored position in the universe, and there is nothing special about Earth on a cosmological level) and most of us just accept it as science. But if the Copernican Principle were wrong and Earth was actually at the center of the universe nothing of utility would change.

Have you ever read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn? It’s a great book on this subject and you probably can get it used on Amazon for a dollar or two.