I noticed in the recently resurrected Evolution thread that someone was once again
proclaiming science to be a religion, and thus I'm back to provide a philosophically
sound rebuttal.

According to the philosopher William James in his work, "The Will to Believe," humans
have an innate need to resolve the state of doubt by forming beliefs, or well-working
habits. Beliefs are not something of a religious stature necessarily, rather we have
beliefs about everything, and it is necessary. However, logically, when a belief
fails to help us live our daily lives, we must form a new, better-working one.
Beliefs as such are temporary -- they are experimental, in a sense. They are a
working definition of how we see our world.

The scientific method functions in a manner extremely similar to this. Science itself
is based upon only a few most basic beliefs which are static -- the belief that
experience is reality, and that standardized observation provides objective, shared
experience. Using these basic premises, science asks questions about the world and
tries to answer them with observation.

At no point the in scientific process does an element of faith enter. Theories do not
gain wide acceptance because they sound nice or because an esteemed scientist came up
with them -- they only gain status as a paradigm, or major leading current of thought
-- by having their predictions repeatedly shown accurate by observation. Note that
scientific consensus always remains a public, social matter -- the work of one
scientist or results of one experiment are NEVER taken as the end answer to any
problem. Rather through collaboration, including repetition of others' experiments,
second-opinion evalutions of concrete evidence, etc, the scientific community
attempts to come to mutual agreement about the correct conclusions.

Neither does the scientific process declare itself to be infallible, or for the
theories it produces to be final. When a theory is disproven, it is the end of the
story, unless that theory is reasonably adaptable, by insight into some ommission or
error. Once a theory no longer works, it must replaced by one that does. A fine
example of just such a replacement is that of Newtonian physics by quantum physics.
The model of Newtonian physics works at the low energy levels and macro-sized
particles we experience in our daily lives, however, its rules paint an incomplete
picture, and because of this, they fail to create accurate predictions on small
scales and at high energy levels. Quantum physics, formulated to explain this realm
of the universe, also makes the same predictions as Newtonian physics when applied en
masse, thus it has verified itself as a more accurate, complete picture of the
universe, and thus it has become the current paradigm of physics. Science does not
know dogma and tells no parables, it simply searches for the most accurate answer to
a question.

James