I am not a scientist and don’t
pretend to know as much pertaining to any specific discipline as a scientist
who has made it their life’s work. That,
however, does not negate the fact that I can study particular disciplines and
come up with a working knowledge of the material. Many scientists do the same thing when they
make statements about things not related to their field of expertise. Some scientists purport to have enough
understanding of the world around them to make claims such as the natural
origin to life is the only explanation for life’s existence. Some scientists study their particular
discipline and theology and come to a different conclusion. Note: this discussion is not about atheism,
which is religious in nature. Many
people associate atheism with science, but the two are far apart.
Science
as a discipline is broad. It covers a
wide range of material such as physics, biology, chemistry, earth science. Each one of these categories encompasses many
sub disciplines; a few of the disciplines of biology are microbiology, anatomy,
genetics and roughly twenty five other disciplines. Physics is also broken down into over twenty
disciplines including astrophysics, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics and the
like. Chemistry has multiple disciplines
as well, such as biochemistry and organic chemistry. Earth science is the study of geology,
geography, seismology as well as a few others.
Though
science encapsulates many disciplines it should be easy to define. Science is the systematic study of the
natural universe. It includes
observation and experiment as it studies the physical world and universe around
us as well as the behavior of all life’s organisms. This study should be purely intellectual and
practical. This study should not be faith
based for long.
Many
people would not think that science is faith based but a working definition of
a hypothesis is faith based. A hypothesis is a proposed explanation to a
question, based on limited evidence.
This definition is not much different than the definition of faith posed
earlier (Faith is the substance of things hoped for without having seen the
full evidence realized). The only
difference is that a hypothesis is one step in the scientific method and if
correct moves away from belief to fact.
The
scientific method is: (1) ask a question, (2) do research to see what
information is out there concerning the question, (3) prepare a hypothesis, (4)
test the hypothesis (do an experiment), (5) analyze the data, and (6)
communicate the results. Step six is to
be done only if the hypothesis is proven to be true. If the hypothesis is proven false or
partially false the scientist is to go back to step three (hypothesis), and
repeat each proceeding step.
This
process works exceptionally well for what it’s intended. Because of science we have natural known
universal laws. There are the
conservation laws, such as, the conservation of mass, the conservation of
energy, the conservation of momentum and the like. There are also approximate conservation
laws. Man is privileged to have the
laws that have come from Einstein’s research such as special relativity which
include mass-energy equivalence (∈=mc2) and general relativity. We have Newton’s
laws, gas laws, chemical laws, electromagnetic laws, thermodynamic laws;
quantum laws so on and so forth.
Without
the scientific method and some exceptional minds working on these processes man
would not have the advancements in science, engineering and technology we
currently enjoy today. We would also be
less able to understand the universe at large; such as the sun, solar systems,
galaxies, dark matter, dark energy and the like. We would be less able to understand weather
patterns, volcanic eruptions and what causes them, what causes earth quakes. Science has been an invaluable tool to man!
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