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What is science?

I found this on an anti-evolution, Christian website.

"Many people do not realize that science was actually developed in Christian Europe by men who assumed that God created an orderly universe. If the universe is a product of random chance or a group of gods that interfere in the universe, there is really no reason to expect order in nature. Many of the founders of the principle scientific fields, such as Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, were believers in a recently created earth. The idea that science cannot accept a creationist perspective is a denial of scientific history."

Is not science knowledge? It was not just developed by any particular human.


Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: "Many people do not realize that science was actually developed in Christian Europe by men who assumed that God created an orderly universe."

It does not matter who developed the scientific method, just like it does not matter who developed the theory of gravity, all that matters is that the ideas work.

What they are saying is like saying "The people who found out the earth is round believed before that the earth was flat" Though not quite that obvious, but I believe it shows my point.

"If the universe is a product of random chance or a group of gods that interfere in the universe, there is really no reason to expect order in nature."

I don't know of any reputable scientist that says the universe is a product of random chance. And I don't see how a singular god would be any better than a group of gods at doing anything. To create a god (that has ALWAYS been there) as an explanation for the existence of something is much MUCH more of a stretch than just saying the universe was always there in some form, and for the last 13.7 billion years in this form. Assuming the existence of an intelligent creator god raises more questions than it answers, instead of explaining how the universe exists we now have to explain how an infinitely complex, infinitely intelligent all knowing, all loving, all powerful being exists. Even the straw-man argument of "random chance" is much much much MUCH more plausible than an ever existing "infinitely complex, infinitely intelligent all knowing, all loving, all powerful being" oh... that just happens to be outside the material world and reality as we know it.

"Many of the founders of the principle scientific fields, such as Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, were believers in a recently created earth. The idea that science cannot accept a creationist perspective is a denial of scientific history."

Science is agnostic to creationism in the grand science, but in the science that a world is less than several thousand years old science is not agnostic, science has shown this to NOT BE TRUE, so in this sense and many others, creationist perspective is in DIRECT conflict with science. But in the science that the universe was created by an intelligent being, science is agnostic, and simply because we don't know how the universe has come to exist.

Science is the concerted human effort to understand, or to understand better, the history of the natural world and how the natural world works, with observable physical evidence as the basis of that understanding. It is done through observation of natural phenomena, and/or through experimentation that tries to simulate natural processes under controlled conditions. So creationism and religion have no place in science.