| I guess you are unacquainted with formal axiomatic basis for the most formal of all sciences (mathematics). Eg. natural numbers are defined by assuming that there exists one, and that there is a successor to one: everything else flows from that (this is an older system, but more approachable than the set theory one). Basically, we never, ever prove that one indeed exists, or that it has a successor: these are assumptions that have so far proven to work well, but we can never tell for sure. In the past, axiomatic systems have been found to be "wrong" when matched against reality (most notably the axiom of parallelism and hyperbolic geometry), so there's nothing to say that any of the other ones are "correct". So we have faith that one exists and that it has a successor. Without evidence, just like you say. Again, none of this makes science useless: it is an approximation of reality that we always work to improve. But some things we can't prove, so we have just assume they are so (otherwise known as faith). |