Quote Originally Posted by Gawain of Orkeny
Pretty much the same for science. Theres little thats really proveable. Its mostly based on the best quess at the moment and faith in science.
Actually the serious types of science isn't at all aiming for finding the absolute truth, that's what philosophy and religion are for. Science is used as a tool for creating useful technology mostly, and the proof of it's sucessfulness can be seen around us every day. There's also unserious science and that's what usually makes it to the newspapers. I'd say 90 percent of all science that's described in the newspapers is unscientific, at best. Sometimes it's even pure lies. So take science for what it is - not the absolute truth, but a tool. The cases where science fails are often when you make too long chains of theoretical reasoning with inaccurate models. But sometimes you can make very good models, where extremely long series of conclusion making gives a result that experiments later confirm. Then you have a model that can claim to be close to the absolute truth, if there is any, but not the entire truth. For instance gases are a system of billions of particles moving as a result of billions of forces acting upon them. We can make an accurate model for calculations and predictions of many things by describing this complex system of forces and movements as random and the formula: pV = nRT. However, we should know that we're in reality "lying" about the entire truth when we apply it. We must know that it only works under certain circumstances, and which limitations it has.

In any case I wonder (I don't have the facts about the consequences of this particular court ruling) if this means creationism, i.e. the first part of Genesis of the Torah and Bible, will be removed altogether from school? The opposite result would imply putting creationism in the biology classes, which would be absurd, as biology classes are about biology science. Creationism should be taught in religion classes of course. If not, then it's a nearly as big scandal as removal of evolution from biology would be (the only reason why I finally find the latter slightly more scandalous is because evolution is a necessary tool to understand much modern science, and it has also seen service in some other fields such as artificial intelligence, which means computing engineering of the USA would be crippled if evolution would be taken out of the biology classes).