HU-Science&Religion

In this post, I want to explore some of the assumptions of science. Most of these are properly called "philosophical assumptions". Here's what I mean by "assumptions of science": the things that make science possible but are not properly speaking part of science. Something like that. Putting it a bit more technically, we might call these the necessary conditions for the very possibility of science. That is, what has to be the case about us, the world, etc. in order for science to be possible? Here are a few that jump at me. I will put an asterisk next to the ones I am not super-duper confident of but am somewhat confident of. Nature is intelligible: The universe is such that it can be made sense of. That is, the universe is not such that it is unintelligible or irrational. If the universe were ultimately unintelligible, then science would not be possible. Or put differently, if the universe were unintelligible, then scientific knowledge would not be possible....

(Some of this material is adapted from Del Ratzsch’s  Science and Its Limits ) Question : What is Science? As we will see this is not an easy question to answer.    But we can make some headway by drawing our attention to some very broad features of science.    Applied vs Theoretical For the most part, in this course, we will be concerned with the theoretical sciences.   These are the sciences that are mainly concerned with understanding and not with how to make something or whatever. So, for example, we might consider examples from physics, but we will not consider examples from engineering.  But a number of other disciplines--disciplines that most do not consider to be a part of the sciences--deal with the theoretical: theology, philosophy, math, logic, etc.    Science by contrast seems to deal primarily with material things and events. So to a first approximation science is a theoretical discipline that is concerned with ...