Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight
They simple must be accepted because there's no reason not to believe they are true. And yet all of science is based on them.
|
This isn't quite true. There is no reason to not believe they are true but there is also a lot of reason to believe that they are true.
Why? Because based on those assumptions we can make predictions about the universe. Predictions that are born out by observation. Unlike simple faith, science includes a method for attempting validation and revision. Simple faith, generally explicitly rejects any such effort ("despite any evidence to the contrary I know the Earth is only 6,000 years old"). And until that process of validation can be performed ideas aren't accepted completely and even then are open to revision and re-examination.
For 200 years the luminiferous ether was accepted as a theoretical necessity because nobody could figure out how light could otherwise move through space. They could think of no experiments to prove its existence but it did a good job of filling a theoretical gap. And yet, even after 200 years of the most educated believing it existed it was still open to examination and by the late 1800s technology was allowing experiments that created paradoxes at odds with the idea of the luminiferous ether and opened the door for relativity.
When Einstein published his paper on the electrodynamics of moving objects (special relativity) there was no objective evidence for it. The technology did not exist to prove it. And yet within a decade it had completely overturned physics because the theory makes sense, makes predictions that matched was was known and also made predictions that could eventually be tested to provide opportunity for validation. Several aspects of relatively were not directly testable for nearly 30 years. Einstein's 1906 prediction of time dilation was not directly measured until the late 1930s (with muon decay) and not to general acceptance until the early 1940s (with direct measurements by cesium clocks on airplanes).
The scienctific method is
not simply a different kind of faith. It has a fundamentally different structure.