05-30-2026, 06:28 AM
Punatang,
Thanks for your thought-provoking and well-thought-out post. I appreciate it very much because it helps clarify a few things.
The only shortcoming of Newton is that we see his theories only centuries later. Rob brought Newton into the discussion for reasons only he can explain, and you'll see in my post that I called him a genius. His theories of gravitation are still used today, even by NASA. However, they are incorrect and have been superseded. They are good enough for government work, but do not explain the effects of relativity and quantum mechanics.
That's the beauty of science: it is continuously self-correcting, based on evidence rather than faith, hope, or popular demand. When done properly, science eschews bias and personal opinions and relies only on actual evidence and on repeatedly testing its own hypotheses. Even today, some modern claims in astronomy, especially in cosmology, are continually changing. What was once solid evidence for a theory is now suddenly called into question by a new observation that challenges its validity.
Religion doesn't work that way. It's stuck with scripture and a god telling people how to behave based on centuries-old writing or word of mouth. Look at how another scientific genius was treated by the catholic church -- Galileo. He is probably the father of modern observational astronomy, yet he was treated as a criminal, imprisoned, defamed, and all because he realized the sun was the center of our solar system. You are more than likely aware that he was right, the pope and the catholic church were wrong, and it took centuries, well after his death, for another pope to issue an apology for how unjustly Galileo was treated.
Science doesn't care about what we'll find out years from now; it cares about what we observe now and our observations, ideas, hypotheses, and theories that we have developed based on real and actual evidence, not some vague idea of what we might discover about a god sometime in the future for which we have no evidence in the present.
Thanks for your thought-provoking and well-thought-out post. I appreciate it very much because it helps clarify a few things.
The only shortcoming of Newton is that we see his theories only centuries later. Rob brought Newton into the discussion for reasons only he can explain, and you'll see in my post that I called him a genius. His theories of gravitation are still used today, even by NASA. However, they are incorrect and have been superseded. They are good enough for government work, but do not explain the effects of relativity and quantum mechanics.
That's the beauty of science: it is continuously self-correcting, based on evidence rather than faith, hope, or popular demand. When done properly, science eschews bias and personal opinions and relies only on actual evidence and on repeatedly testing its own hypotheses. Even today, some modern claims in astronomy, especially in cosmology, are continually changing. What was once solid evidence for a theory is now suddenly called into question by a new observation that challenges its validity.
Religion doesn't work that way. It's stuck with scripture and a god telling people how to behave based on centuries-old writing or word of mouth. Look at how another scientific genius was treated by the catholic church -- Galileo. He is probably the father of modern observational astronomy, yet he was treated as a criminal, imprisoned, defamed, and all because he realized the sun was the center of our solar system. You are more than likely aware that he was right, the pope and the catholic church were wrong, and it took centuries, well after his death, for another pope to issue an apology for how unjustly Galileo was treated.
Science doesn't care about what we'll find out years from now; it cares about what we observe now and our observations, ideas, hypotheses, and theories that we have developed based on real and actual evidence, not some vague idea of what we might discover about a god sometime in the future for which we have no evidence in the present.