I would think a lot of subatomic research came after the Manhattan Project. It's all about funding, the US government being the major funding player in this nation. Since subatomic research gave the atomic bomb and weapons of mass destruction, they have poured money into science.

I agree with your science as a religion thing for the general public, but I think that generally people in scientific backgrounds don't really stick so hard to "facts" and just think of them as theories.

There is this book.... I can't remember the scientist that wrote it, but in my Complex System Theories physics class I took a few years ago, we talked about how she related scientific laws and theories to empirical data. None of it matched up well at all. Every law was more of a rough estimate to give human logic to a natural force which is exactly what religion is meant to do.

I remember in one of my philosophy of religion classes there is a religion called Advaita Vedanta Hinduism which can be summed up as there is no actual god, but in order to obtain nirvana one must realized that Brahman (god, truth) is the objective reality that is beyond human perception. In other words, we can not truly know anything as it is objectively, because we are always looking at it though a subjective perspective. This also relates to Heisenberg uncertainty principle as well as Plato's thought about how in order to see one needs light (which is related to how one knows that God is "good" is that there needs to be an objective form of Good)

The concept of a universal absolute (truth, brahman, god, nirvana) beyond what we can express or understand through relative truths, sensory experience, or rational thought is one of the few in which I'm tempted to put any stock. Even amidst Judeo-Christian scholars there are schools of thought who espouse similar principles. I don't think that it's entirely beyond the grasp of human perception, because in a universe of infinite possibility anything is possible, but certainly (or almost certainly) it's beyond the grasp of all but the most diligent and profound seekers. One of the steps that most believers seem to believe is necessary if one were to attain that perception is ceasing to differentiate between the suchliness of the self and the stuff of the universe and the stuff of ordinary things and the stuff of God, between concepts like none, one, many and infinite, and realizing that everything is everything or something to that effect. To that end, I was intrigued to learn the basics (about all I can comprehend) of String Theory, which seems to point towards a similar metaphysical destination and struck me as a very spiritually advanced scientific outlook.

Okay, I'll grant you a couple things.

First, everything one "knows" is experiential, and we can only accept or reject new information by comparing it with other information. Epistemology tries to define a piece of "knowledge" as a "true, justified belief," but one of the problems it runs into is that it's impossible to check truth directly.

Second, I don't put much stock in religion either. For one thing, the Bible (at least) contradicts itself, which shouldn't be possible if the God truly wanted humans to take it as guidance. This goes, too, for other religions all contradicting each other.

But "science" doesn't refer to a collection of facts. Rather, it's a process of modeling the world and determining which models work best. Your computer depends on numerous applications of robust models of physics revolving around electricity and magnetism as parts of the same force. Further, you have most likely been vaccinated against diseases, and the whole concept of vaccinations depended on one man theorizing the interplay between smallpox and cowpox.

As to why one should accept the dynamic tenets of science over the static tenets of religion: Religion doesn't allow that its tenets might be wrong, but often they are, and to continue to hold to an unsound model is fundamentally stupid. Science looks at that and accepts that neither are its own tenets immune from being inaccurate, and has provisos for self-correction. Besides, science makes predictions about the world that consistently outperform religion in both scope and accuracy.

I don't think that science refers to a collection of facts, my issue is with people who seem to, and in part with the education system in which i was raised which presents it as such. We studied the Big Bang theory, and the theory of evolution, and we were taught what the concept of a theory entails, but a get the impression that a lot of people accept scientific theories as hard fact, particularly people who are somewhat-educated; people who got a degree or two in non-scientific fields and believe that knowledge is power etc etc.

I saw a bumper sticker once or twice on what I assume were the cars of snarky lefties (oh me and my assumptions) that said "Yeah, evolution is a theory... just like gravity" But of course, gravity IS a theory, even though at one level we're taught that it's a law and it's what pulls things down to the earth and it will always be here for us. At another level we're taught that gravity effects all things the same, and that if you drop a brick and a feather in a vacuum they'll hit the ground at the same time. But then we're taught at another level that no, gravity does NOT effect everything the same, that it's a function of distance and mass and that if you dropped a brick and a feather from high enough the brick would indeed hit first because the attraction of gravity is greater between more massive bodies.

All of these things could be said to be true, even though the truth that gravity effects all things on earth equally is contradicted by the truth that gravity is relative to size and distance, because they are relative truths applicable in certain situations and under certain conditions. In as far as one's day to day life, gravity is predictable enough to be thought of as a law and we needn't worry about unsticking from the planet; from the height of a middle school science teacher, the difference in time between when a brick and a feather hit the ground is so infinitesimally small as to be negligible for all practical purposes; the factors of mass and distance are related to such an exponential degree that their effects are only noticeable on a scale far more massive than most people will ever have to apply functionally or even think about.

Certainly at the level of computer engineering or disease research, relative truths are perfectly acceptable because they have practical applications.

The problem I was trying to address arises when people like our bumper-sticker-bearers extrapolate these relative truths, particularly truths of the lower strata, to unwarranted absolutes., and while what a teacher teaches and a student perceives are also relative, in general it has been my experience that our schools and our schools of thought often encourage - or don't do enough to discourage, at any rate - people from making these extrapolations.

I think that, while there is a lot of ego and certainty in individuals within and without the scientific community, those with more subtle minds are well aware that they are establishing models, not facts. I think that's true in religion as well. Religions and their adherents have evolved in their own right through the ages, which is why there are so darn many of them, and there are practitioners of just about all faiths who know (or at least think) that everything they are taught is not infallible and that everything they believe is not certain, and who accept their religious teachings and beliefs as models of the world that suit them best.

Upon rereading I see I should have made it clear that not only do I take issue with the compartments of Religion/Belief and Science/Fact but also with the very practice of making those compartmentalizations. Perhaps I invited this, addressing religion as a whole, as if the very concept and all that it refers to compose a grand entity about which one can make grand assertions like "Religion doesn't allow that its tenets might be wrong," is, at least on paper, an example of the sort of relative-truth-treated-as-an-absolute-fact that got my so antsy in the first place.

The idea of "This is 100% truth!" seems to be a problem that is held in various fields of study. It's comparable in my mind to the trend in critical theories for every new movement to completely denounce all other movements. Deconstructionists thought they were the end all be all of analysis, so did Freud, so did all others. But of course the difference between academia and the fields of science here is that english professors teach under the idea that there are useful elements in all of these theories/practices and you should pick and choose and combine. I don't understand why there isn't more teaching of this sort of pick and choose, nothing is concrete (not even concrete!) mentality.

"spending billions of dollars to explore the outer reaches of space or the inner workings of subatomic particles might help us to "better understand" our universe but it does nothing to address practical problems. Why are some of the most brilliant, inquisitive minds on our planet occupying themselves with questions whose answers are essentially useless? So much of modern science seems to have no goal but to satisfy its own curiosity; to amass "knowledge" and then debunk that knowledge. Who gives a shit if the universe is filled with god or dark matter or cotton candy?"

In the process of understanding the universe, we learn to manipulate it. "Useless" knowledge never is; it's just waiting for its application.

Refining knowledge is how we got where we are from being cavemen scrambling to survive in a hostile world. Why should we stop now?

As to being uncertain about the basic facts of the world you exist in, yes, you might suddenly have allll the atoms in your body spontaneously leap ten meters to the north-east, but the likelihood of this happening, or of you continuing to live after having your throat blocked, is pretty much nil. Now perhaps there is some way to get a lever into the probability of these sorts of things happening and actually work it. I dunno. But nobody's found one yet, so we treat it as "fact". (And if anyone ever does find such a thing, it will probably be a result of combining some obscure bit of previously-purely recreational mathematics with a theory about how the universe works.)

We sharpen the sword of our theories upon the facts of the universe; occasionally we try to cleave them with it. If they break then they're not facts.

Pardon me for barging in, I stumbled across this journal while I was page surfing. I just wanted to thank you for this well-thought out and incredibly enlightening journal.

I have always said that science, while advancing more and more by the second, is not always right, and a theory is always just that-a theory. We learn more and more about the universe and our own world every day, but that does not mean we have all of the answers even about seemingly obvious things in nature like the theory of gravity, as you stated above. In school, I was told I was wrong, and that of COURSE the textbook is absolutely correct, it's been accredited by experts in the field in which they study so why dispute their knowledge? I think that this is usually a symptom of having a textbook written by experts and researchers (who actually understand that most of what we "know" actually comes from theory), but attending classes taught by teachers. While they certainly know their stuff to a certain extent, you don't find too many high school level teachers who are as well versed in the subject matter as one of the many people involved in writing a textbook.
I've always found it amusing how people sort of worship scientists as if they know the secrets of the universe or something. While you do indeed have to be highly intelligent to enter a field like medicine or astronomy, it doesn't mean you have all the answers. An astronomer may know a great deal more about the behavior of bodies in space than others, and he may even be an expert, but that doesn't mean that something he knows to be "fact" won't be disproven when we learn something new in a couple of years.

However, I would also like to point out that science is ever-increasingly motivated by money. If a doctoral candidate wants to study what makes the universe behave the way it does, he's going to tell his benefactors "this is what I have found, and this is the gospel truth." The financial backers of research projects are often not scientists themselves, so they likely do not understand the concept of "theory." If a researcher tells his backers "I've discovered a lot, but I can really only tell you what MIGHT be the cause of the behavior I observed, and someday another physicist may come along and prove me wrong" he won't get the money he needs to do his research. The bottom line equals money and results. I'm sure ego has a lot to do with it, but I think the fact that without the financial backing of result-oriented donors, many research projects would have been dropped before they started.

Science is an ever-growing field, and humanity may never know all of the answers. I certainly hope we don't. It would be far too boring just knowing everything. As for study of outer space being useless, I agree with you in a practical sense, to a certain extent. However, I think it's a very human desire to want to know the world in which you live. As technology advances, we'll have more opportunities to find out whether we were right about a particular theory, and even new things we couldn't have imagined. I'm not just talking about space either. Right here on Earth, there are so many things unknown. Space exploration has actually proven useful in the exploration of deep ocean. Medical advances have been made from the bacteria and the animals that were found there, and rich deposits of Magnesium are thought to be useful in curing countless diseases. It took us a long time to get there, and hundreds of miles into space might seem like a roundabout way to get to 2 miles under the surface of the ocean, but we would not have gotten there without the moon landing.

When I was taught those things the ever expanding universe was considered the most likely possibility. The evidence for that theory seems to have been piling up since then. I'm not actually sure whether what I knew came from my teacher or those books on science for kids but I knew there were three possibilities for the end of the universe based on it's shape, that it would start contracting and end in a big crunch, that it would stop expanding but not contract (such an equilibrium considered very unlikely) or expand forever. Furthermore I knew scientists were not sure about the shape of the universe yet.

That the big crunch theory was taught as a fact is not a fault of science but of pedagogy. Science is just a process for refining our knowledge by empirical or mathematical means. As such it's a very successful one. Proving past theories wrong is not a weakness but a strenght. Of course this is all subject to the limits of epistemology, the most thoroughly proven scientific theory is still only an approximation and we can doubt the certainty of everything. However going to such solipsist extremes as denouncing all knowledge as equally invalid is just not very helpful, there are degrees of certainty. Back when the big crunch theory was considered the most likely explanation even school children might have benefited from knowing it was just one of many possibilities. On the other end the theory of evolution in the broad sense doesn't really have a scientific alternative, there is not really any controversy to teach. It is still a theory but we should learn about the limitations of that in epistemology or when we learn about scientific theory.

I don't really think one can be a good scientist without being aware of those limitations, I think religion is far more prone to declare certainty about knowledge. In fact I think people's acceptance of and teaching of scientific theories as facts is a side-effect of that. We might accept the theory of the big crunch in the same way we learnt to accept that Jesus' resurrection was a fact. The exploration of religious fanatics of the inherent doubt in all scientific theories to attack them might also have driven scientists into defence, seeking to present their theories as unequivocal facts.

Science often makes use of fundamental research to address practical problems. The arcane research of subatomic particles might seem entirely pointless but modern advances in computers rely on it. The scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th century was mostly the work of the idle rich that might not have had any particular interest in the practical applications of their work. Humans are also curious about the world and one activity doesn't preclude another. Otherwise shouldn't we just as well stop spending billions of dollars on philosophers, theologians and priests as astronomers and particle physicists?

Because capitalism and money and greed. We are so immature as a species that these base compulsions still rule our world. Like the Comedian in Watchmen - it's all a joke. We're mature enough to recognize greed is bad/a sin, but don't have the fortitude to stop being enslaved by it.

But the grandest joke of all? After billions of years of evolution, we've finally gained awareness for just long enough to realize we're going to lose it. It's terrifying. Fear of death...the ultimate cosmic joke. If you get it, the jokes on you.