The Case Against Miracles by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hypatia Press
Published: 2019-11-21T16:00:00+00:00

What science is

Science is the opposite of magic. Where magic (and the magical aspects of religion) demand the supernatural, science rejects any reliance on the supernatural. Science states that the world is material, and that it can be successfully investigated through material means.

Where magical knowledge is occult, meaning hidden, scientific knowledge is out in the open, published in journals, and subject to examination and retesting by anyone. Where magic is dramatic, science is quietly determined. It approaches reality in small, humble steps, making sure of each step, and slowly accumulates tiny bits of knowledge. On a day-to-day basis science is unimpressive. But the small bits of knowledge accumulate and add up. Like one snowflake, one tiny bit of scientific knowledge has no real impact and can seem trivial. But as with snowflakes, when enough gang up in a blizzard, they’re a force that changes your world.

Put another way, science is a bulldozer that moves at the speed of a glacier. You may never see it progressing from year to year, but it is moving and changing everything in its path.

Science is a method of investigation . By using that method of investigation, we have gained huge bodies of knowledge. Sometimes people get confused, and think that science is only this large warehouse full of jumbled facts, instead of also being the method by which we find facts out, then see how they fit together to make coherent structures, and how these structures reveal deep principles underlying all.

Careful observation is its root. Science is really just the art of looking carefully. The origin of all science is systematic observation. The investigator works with things that are observed.

When a science is new, the observations are often just descriptive—catalog-making—as investigators get the lay of the land. But experience has shown that for a science to advance, the observations must become quantified in some useful way. That is, they must involve numbers. Numbers, it turns out, are essential to the art of looking carefully.

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