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