Are scietists really at God's door?

Question

Pub regular, Old Sid reckons today's scientists know as much about 'God's' laws as a fruit fly knows about making a cup of tea. How much nearer or further away than Old Sid's example is the current store of knowledge?

Answer 1

Well that really depends on what you mean by God's laws.

If God's laws are things like the 10 commandments - well then that's not really science is it?

If Gods laws are some deep and spiritual insight then also - not really the domain of science.

If Gods laws are akin to physical laws we cirtainly understand a lot more about the universe than we used to, but what we are discovering at a far greater rate is how much we don't know.

as one commentator put it - we know a lot less about a lot more.

Answer 2

One of the big steps in science came from two fields, chaos theory and quantum mechanics. These two fields told us we can't know everything because a)  The level of precision is impossible to obtain and b) Some knowledge are mutually exclusive, such as velocity and position.

Our large scale understanding and the "general" laws that govern how the universe works are getting more refined - we're not at gods door maybe in his drive.

Answer 3

We are getting smarter and we know more than ever before. However history taught us that there is no such thing as knowing everything. 100 years ago physicists thought they have basically figured out all there is about the world, turned out that not only they were wrong but also we realized  that what we thought is absolute true is just plain wrong. I think that we are no nearer to know "God's" low than we were 100 years ago. The deeper we dig we just keep finding new stuff, it's like fractals.

Answer 4

Old Sid is right.  Scientists like to pretend that they know all the answers, but they are mostly kidding themselves.  Not only do we know next to nothing, but we are getting further away from from complete knowledge.  If you study science at all, you will see that everytime one question is answered a whole host of new questions arises.

Answer 5

It is a common misconception that scientists think they know everything. I think it comes from a couple of things. The first being that when a scientist spouts off about something others don't understand or don't want to beleive they say "he doesn't know what he's talking about, he couldn't know that for sure", this annoys me, because usually the scientist is the one who has really thought this through. The second reason is probably a bigger contributing factor. Sometimes scientists get things wrong! Especially if they state something confidently and are disproved. It is only natural that things such as thalidomide shake the public's confidence in scientists and sciene, and in a way it is fair enough.

No proper scientist pretends they know all the answers. The general thing is we can't PROVE anything. We can find a lot of evidence to support a theory, we can also find one piece of evidence to disprove a theory. Some theories are so well supported that I would say I strongly believe it to be true, but in a way I don't know anything is true!

One thing that my physics teacher used to tell me that might interest you (and Old Sid) is that towards the end of the 19th century physicists thought they could nearly explain everything. But then people came forward with new experiments that disproved some of the old theories (Einstein being the most famous). It was then that we realised the universe is a lot more complicated than we thought. So since then they think their understanding of the universe has moved forward, but also that they are further away from understanding everything than their 19th century contemporaries thought that they were.

Personally I don't thing there will ever be a time when we (the human race) can fully say. "We completely understand how the universe works". Although scientific advances have allowed big improvements in our quality of life, so we should keep trying.

Answer 6

Science and Religion don't go together. Have you ever read the book Angels and Demons? It's by the guy who wrote the Davinci Code