Goals of science
From RationalWiki
One of the often mistaken beliefs of many deeply religious people is that science is trying to explain away God. This is most well publicized in the debates over evolution in the United States, from the Scopes trial to Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.
The goals of science are to try to best predict what will happen next given a set of situations. One of the earliest uses of science was to predict the seasons for ancient cultures - when to plant crops and when to harvest. Another early application of science was to predict the location of planets in the sky on a given day. By observing regular patterns of motion early astronomers theorized about how the universe was laid out, and made models which predicted where a planet was and then further refined the model as predictions where shown to be correct or incorrect.
This progress went from the geocentric Ptolemaic system of geocentrism to the Copernican heliocentric system which was better able to predict the locations of planets to Kepler refining the orbits from circles to ellipses to Newton explaining the mechanism that made them orbit to Einstein and relativity accounting for the precession of perihelion of Mercury. Each shift of paradigm in science allows for better predictions about how the natural world works. When carrying out scientific experiments scientists use Methodological naturalism which assumes that supernatural phenomena are not influencing their investigations.
Returning to the debate on evolution, evolution predicts what fossils can be be found in a particular strata of rock - that you will not find early mammals in a rock strata below one containing a dimetrodon. This is because the earliest mammalian features showed up in reptiles long before something that would be recognized as a mammal today evolved - the dimetrodon was the first animal to have teeth that were differentiated, something that all mammals today have. The goal of evolution is not to say "creation stories are wrong" but rather to understand what life came before - how we got from single celled animals to the diversity of life that we see today.
Darwin made some predictions about animals seeing the 'battle' between flowers and their pollinators. Flowers 'want' to get pollen attached to whatever pollenates them. Not so much a 'want' but rather that is how plants survive. Likewise, animals want to get get food more easily. In this battle, flowers that were most successful were those that got the most pollen on the animal - and those were the ones with the nectar far enough down in the flower so the animal had to get in the pollen, but not too far down that it would be impossible. Similarly, animals that were most successful were the ones with the longest apparatus for getting at the nectar.
When Darwin saw the Angraecum sesquipedale with a 20-35 cm distance between the opening of the flower and where the nectar was stored, he theorized there must be a moth with a tongue that is that length too, even though he never saw it.
| “ | "[A. sesquipetale has] nectaries 11 and a half inches long, with only the lower inch and a half filled with very sweet nectar [...] it is, however, surprising, that any insect should be able to reach the nectar: our English sphinxes have probosces as long as their bodies; but in Madagascar there must be moths with probosces capable of extension to a length of between 10 and 12 inches!" (Darwin, 1862:197-198) | ” |
Forty years later, a moth was found that fit the description - Xanthopan morganii[1] This was not a prediction that could have been made based on any holy book or supernatural cause but rather through observation of the natural world, an understanding of the history of the species involved.[2]
There is no inherent atheism in science. Instead there is an understanding that any theory that can predict anything - however "God made it that way" - has no predictive power at all. Thus is not a useful tool for examining how the world works and the interactions between different things - be it atoms and molecules, cells and organisms, or stars and galaxies. Only predictions that can be proven wrong are useful and advance our understanding of how the universe works.
