Raise the Hammer

KS, you're wrong about science. It isn't a religion, and it isn't based on faith. People who don't understand science compare it to religion, don't let your ignorance tar science the same as religion.

Science is a way of looking at the world, a way of studying how it works so you can understand it well enough to predict what affect a particular action will have.

Slide a quarter across a carpet, what happens? It slows down and stops. Now slide a quarter across a marble floor. What happens - it slides farther before it slows down and stops. Now slide it across an ice rink. It slides really far before it slows down and stops.

People used to think the natural state of an object was at rest, because in their experience things slowed down and stopped.

It took a scientific attitude - don't assume, test your idea under as many different conditions as possible, control for other variables so you're only testing one thing - to figure out that the natural state of an object is to keep going in the same direction at the same speed until an outside force acts on it.

That's Newton's first law of motion. Once you understand it, you can understand why things appear the way they do (the quarter slows and stops because of two outside forces - gravity, which pulls it down, and friction, which slows it. It slides farthest on the ice rink because ice has less friction than carpet or marble).

If you don't witness scientific experiments first hand, then you need to start doing some science. Don't just assume that it's wrong because you don't understand it or didn't see it, any more than you should assume it's right just because a scientist said it. The whole reason science works so well is not that scientists automatically believe each other, but because they constantly challenge each other, test each other's theories, try to reproduc each others experiments.

Just because you don't do science is no reason to assume it's wrong - that's the real superstition.