Quote:
Originally Posted by Anh_Minh
Not quite true. Science involves the the faith that the world is intelligible. That tomorrow will be much the same as today, and thus the scientific method (whatever that means) will allow us to discover the rules of the world. We're pretty confident that the sun will rise tomorrow the same as it did today, and yesterday, and so on... But ultimately, we can't be 100% sure.
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More to the point, it's the belief in the consistency and constancy of the universe: that the principles by which the cosmos operate will be the same from one moment to the next, and not spontaneously "rewritten". Obviously, this is out of keeping with any faith that believes in a deity who actively tinkers with His creations, hence the rise of of religious beliefs in a "Clockwork Universe" and "Natural Laws", as well as Deism, alongside the development of science.
Of course, people can never be 100 percent sure of anything, but science is ultimately about how well a theory's predictions fit the data. If they don't, the idea is discarded and something else is tried until the conceptual framework matches real-life output. There is no such thing as complete certainty (such is more common in religions, which believe in the ability to
have absolute truths), but as an ongoing process, science constantly strives to better align its theories with observed reality. In this way, science is, and has been, quite iconoclastic, since it goes where the evidence leads rather than kowtowing to accepted Authority, and any upstart can upend even the most respected of theories by presenting a model that better accounts for the facts.
Now obviously, if the uniformitarian assumption happened to break down due to a supernatural entity rewriting local (or universal) reality, science would have to revisit its most basic tenets. But so far, it's worked pretty well.