Science is not a Religion

I recently got so riled up after reading an article in my Student Newspaper that implied that I wrote them a letter.  Their article implied that Science was a belief based and had some similarity with Religion.  This is entirely incorrect.

They didn’t publish my letter, nor any other letters disagreeing with their paper.  They published a whole weeks paper entitled “The God Issue”, but only had one anti-religious article.  Such a biased rag, I will never read it again. The letter is below:

Science is not a religion, nor is it in any way faith based.

The scientific method makes one assumption: the Universe obeys a set of rules. If the Universe follows these rules, ten those rules can be determined from observing the way Universe behaves. If the Universe obeys the rules, then the rules must be revealed by that behaviour.

Science is not a database of knowledge – it’s a method of finding knowledge: observe, hypothesise, predict, experiment/observe, revise. Science is also provisional as it is always open to improvement and is constantly being revised.

You do not have any respectable physicists unquestioningly believing in Newtonian Dynamics.  Why? Because it has been superseded by Relativity.  This is because Relativity is a more accurate model of observed effects, and has been repeatedly confirmed through observation. Even Relativity cannot explain everything, so physicists will continue questioning it – but they will be using the scientific method, described above, to do so.