Why doesn't science get its act together?

Question

When I was in grade school in the 1940's they taught us that during the middle ages there was an almost universal belief that rats, mice, flies, c**k-roaches and other "vermin" were spontaneously generated from garbage and other trash. They convinced us that science through the scientific method had succesfully shown that this wasn't true. This made me into a scientist. Then in later years science, amazingly, started teaching that life and even the universe arose spontaneously out of mostly nothing. There is no way I know of to prove this one way or the other. But it is a disconcerting discrepancy in their ACT. Why can't they just teach, honestly, "I don't know how it originated."?

Answer 1

Hmm... The "rules" of science are based on experience. Humans experience things in a narrow range of lengths, times, and masses. We then extend the "rules" that appear to be obeyed in those scales to scales that are larger and smaller than the scales from which those rules were derived. It should not be a surprise that at scales significantly different from the scales from which the rules were derived the rules are not followed. So on tiny tiny distance and mass scales on huge huge time scales something can appear from nothing. But on time, length, and mass scales like meat and maggots something cannot appear from nothing.

You are thinking too concretely, too simplistically. You are imaging that subatomic particles play by the same rules as maggots. And that just does not make sense.

Answer 2

Man, who have you been talking to?  Anyone who tells you that scientists know all of the secrets of life and the universe is no scientist worth a d**n.  In any case, what I think you're referring to is an idea called abiogenesis, which is a far cry from the type of spontaneous generation of the middle ages.

Answer 3

You should try reading some of Philip Johnson.

In his latest critique, he identifies and dissects a key philosophical assumption which constrains the ways data is allowed to be interpreted in the physical sciences. He describes this as

‘a philosophy called naturalism or materialism or physicalism or simply modernism. Under any of those names this philosophy assumes that in the beginning were the fundamental particles that compose matter, energy and the impersonal laws of physics. To put it negatively, there was no personal God who created the cosmos and governs it as an act of free will. It God exists at all, he acts only through inviolable laws of nature and adds nothing to them. In consequences, all the creating had to be done by the laws and the particles, which is to say by some combination of random chance and lawlike regularity.’

This contrasts with the common image of scientists being objective and impartial analysts who allow the empirical facts to speak for themselves. Quite the contrary, if chance plus immutable natural laws must be capable of explaining all reality, then absurd explanations become acceptable given the lack of a better alternative within the permissible possibilities.

http://creationontheweb.com/content/view...

The hypothesis of abiogenesis is promoted as fact simply because evolution requires it to be true. It is believed by faith, yet promoted as fact!

Proper scientific process shows us that abiogenesis is unscientific and false.

There is a good article here explaining why this is so:

http://creationontheweb.com/content/view...

Answer 4

I suspect the idea that life and even the universe arose out of mostly nothing was from a PopSci program rather than school.

The rise of life.  ===> Scientists think they know what conditions existed on the Earth when it first formed.  They "sorta" start with a big ball of flaming stuff, add an occasional comet or asteroid and go forward from there.  Their picture of this ancient situation was that the Earth was initially molten and gradually cooled over the next few millions of years.

Sooner or later, probably about four billion years ago, life formed.  There was nothing particularly strange about this.  Given the correct mix of chemicals, temperatures, and a source of energy, and the Laws of Nature, life formed.

Traces of life and the time it existed are found in fossils, so the evolution of life is pretty well known.

Beginning of the Universe ==> As for the beginning of the Universe, no one was there, so no one knows, but certain evidence exists much like certain evidence exists for life, and an interpretation of this evidence is made.

Science is often misguided due to fear, religion, other opinions and things like that.  To say that science is "flaky" because of these factors is unfair.  Sometimes scientists get carried away with their own pet theories.  This is a fault of man, not science.

Suppose 200 years ago a bright kid was studing algebra.  It happens that the kid was aware of the idea of relative motion.  The kid was also aware that the speed of light was constant.  Being a bright kid, he put the idea of relative motion and the constancy of the speed of light together, performed the necessary algebra, and showed his teacher

how he had discovered a Theory of Relativity.

Teaching the unknown. ==> In algebra I the unknown is "that's covered in Algebra II".  In algebra II the unknown is "that's covered in algebra III".  In science the unknown is "see me after class."

Answer 5

Human instinct, we created a hypothesis then try and solve it. If we can't solve it, then we believe in the hypothesis until we find a better solution/theory. But I think you are right.

Answer 6

Oh c'mon Mac.  If what you know about the orgins of life is what you were taught in *grade school* in the 1940's ... are you *really* surprised to learn that science is a little more involved than that ... and may have progressed a *little* since the 1940's.

First, what you learned in grade school about the middle ages concerned the question of "spontaneous generation" ... the idea that (as you correctly point out) that rats, mice, flies, etc. emerged from trash.   This is *HUGELY* different from the idea that early cellular life arose over a span of a *billion* years in the roiling oceans or other bodies of water in the early earth.  Two *COMPLETELY* different concepts!

Even as you were going to grade school, there was already a lot of research going on in the field of abiogenesis ... from Oparin in the 30's and 40's to Haldane in the 40's and 50's these were pretty groundbreaking concepts, so you may not have been exposed to them in grade school or even high school.   But a *lot* has been discovered since then (Miller and Urey in the 1950's, Sidney Fox in the 50's and 60's, Eigen and Shuster in the 70's, Günter Wächtershäuser in the 80's, and so on).

Meanwhile in astronomy and astrophysics, the science of cosmology was advancing in similar leaps and bounds.  They don't know (yet) what caused the Big Bang, but they are pretty darned sure that the universe is not of an infinite age, but instead originated about 12 to 14 billion years ago.  This is not "teaching" that the universe arose spontaneously out of mostly nothing.  It is teaching what mainstream astronomers all pretty much agree on ... that the universe is expanding today, and therefore must have been much smaller before, and cannot have been expanding for much more than 14 billion years.

It is not being much of a "scientist" to wonder why modern science is different from how you remember it in grade school 60 years ago!

Answer 7

They ought to simply say that they don't know.

Answer 8

Mac if you are a "scientist" as you claim then you should realize that what is taught in middle school is not even close to what physics chemistry and biology are like at even the high-school level, and the difference between those and what is taught in university is another order of magnitude in terms of complexity. If you have problems with the way stuff is taught in schools you should complain to the politicians, they are the ones making the decision to dumb things down for the public at large. You are obviously refering to the theories of 'abiogenenis' this is not precisely the same thing as the theory of "spontaneous generation" Spontaneous generation was proposed by Aristotle, espoused by theologians in the Middle Ages, including Thomas Aquinas, and upheld by the likes of William Harvey and Isaac Newton. Only when the hypothesis was properly put to the test by experiments, such as those of Redi in 1668. The belief in spontaneous generation was still popular until the experiments performed by Pasteur in 1862, when it was seen to be in error. Any lingering doubts were removed by the work of Tyndall. However, the notion that life can develop from non-life, albeit over many millions of years, has been revived in the modern concept of the origin of life from pre-biotic chemicals. This is not the same as the idea that it is spontaneously generated from roting or decaying organic materials... it is the idea that organic chemicals can result from inorganic processes, and that under very special circumstances those chemicals were able to start a cyclical replication or a chain reaction that started life-like or biological processes.

In university at least with good professors we are taught to be open, to assume nothing about how life arose from nonliving matter.

It is not an "ACT" it is science: the process of collecting a body of knowledge of what we as a species are learning... If you want acting try the arts - like theology. From what you have written it's obvious that you are the one with an act - and you are just a troll acting like a real poster with a question.

Answer 9

Science isn't so much about what you think you know, it's about what you don't know.   And one of the fundamental "truths" about science is that the more we think we know, the more for sure know we don't know!

Science is about doubt, not certainty.  Empirical method demands that we continually challenge, not only the unknown & uncertain, but (more importantly) what we hold to be true in light of new data, new theories & new perceptions.

So, in fact science does "have it's act together".  It's just that the act is always changing & ever evolving.

So to answer your question, science is based on "I don't know".  Maybe the issue is that most people don't really gronk that...

Answer 10

oIf you asked the 6 million dollar question how did it all begin

no one would know,they can guess or try find a scientific answer to it but no one really knows.I am a medium and i have seen spirit but you would try find another explanation to that but i have experienced that several times,seen spirit ,felt spirit and heard them and no i am not nutty at all.What would the scientist say to that they would give their interpretation on it but what about me i am the one who is experiencing these things so how can i expect you to see what i see.They can not teach you honestly because they do not know like you.

Answer 11

have no fear, there is actually no conflicting ideas in what you said (middle people thought life arose from garbage and proven that is wasn't vs. life being made in the universe spontaneously).

In the middle ages, people thought that visible and complex organisms (animals) arose from nothing.  Evolution is a process that takes millions/billions of years, so it would be impossible for such creatures like flies to be born from garbage in several days.  

First life, however, could be formed out of nothing technically speaking.  The miller-urey experiment showed that conditions in earthly Earth could possibly create life.  They combined water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen, added heat and electricity (replicating lightning) and later discovered that amino acids (pretty much the building blocks of life) were formed.  Keep in mind that the first cells weren't at all complex.

It took more than 3 billion years to go from unicellular to animals.

So really, there's no discrepancy at all, just a bunchy of information.