[JoeAltmaier]

There are a vast majority doing good work. Your cell phone is a towering testament to this. To be fair, try making the converse argument: how many religious zealots avoid bias? Zero. Lets not condemn science on the basis of a strawman ("some scientists somewhere are not very good")

[cinquemb]

> There are a vast majority doing good work. Your cell phone is a towering testament to this. To be fair, try making the converse argument: how many religious zealots avoid bias? Zero. Lets not condemn science on the basis of a strawman ("some scientists somewhere are not very good")

Yet to uphold what people consider science today, you use one example. As if the vast majority of scientists had anything to do with the development of the cell phone (and use the word testament which has a non zero religious connotations), and give no lip service to how many religious people throughout the times have supported scientific endeavors…

[JoeAltmaier]

I leave other examples to the reader. Hint: point at anything near you. It was the result of science.

As for honoring the religious who supported science. I say, to the degree they pursued religion, they shortchanged their scientific accomplishments. Consider what else Newton might have done, had he abandoned his alchemy and astrology.

[cinquemb]

From wikipedia:

"Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge"[2]) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe."

From such definition, if I could point at every person and say it was the result of systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of a testable explanations and predictions about the universe, it wouldn't be a stretch for one to think that such seems to be in favor of an omniscient being :P

Consider that there was probably some function of Newtons alchamey and astrology experience that allowed him to put forth other ideas that we are willing accept from testable hypothesis… or that had their been no Newton, the phenomena that he described, would have still existed, yet people at that time would continued to have no testable understanding of it.

[pdonis]

> point at anything near you. It was the result of science.

The result of some particular branches of science where we do, in fact, have reliable knowledge and the ability to make accurate predictions.

But that is very, very different from "science" in general. There are many more fields that are called "sciences" but do not have anything like that kind of reliable knowledge or predictive power. So it's not enough to just say "science"; you have to specify the field, so we know which category it falls into.

[jleyank]

As others have said "If it's not testable it's not science".

[pdonis]

If only everyone applied that rule when deciding what fields to call "sciences".