Science was the authority in the modern world. People would try to prove their points by referring to science, even when there is no supporting evidence. Unfortunately, many people really do not understand what science is, and others use the word to deceive. Today in the postmodern world, science does not have the same authority, because each person is his own authority. Today, each person decides what facts they want to believe, and what facts they do not want to believe. Reason and rational critical thinking have taken a back seat to one’s own feelings.
Science is a discipline that builds and organizes knowledge about the universe. Modern science has two major branches: the natural sciences, which study the physical world, and the social sciences, which study individuals and societies. Some include a third branch called “formal sciences” which includes mathematics and logic, but this branch does not use the scientific method, so I would not include it. I would say the “formal sciences” are part of the foundation of science.
Science uses the scientific method. It can vary a little but scientists tend to follow these steps.
- Make observations;
- Research the topic and develop questions;
- Formulate hypothesis for determining the cause;
- Test the hypothesis by making testable predictions;
- Collect and analyze the observations;
- Develop conclusions based on the evidence;
- If the data support the hypothesis then consider refining the hypothesis and returning to step 4.
- If the data do not support the hypothesis then reject the hypothesis and return to step 1.
- Publish the hypothesis and the results so that others can learn and replicate the results.
Note the scientific method does not prove anything to be true. Instead the scientific method is about proving things false. That said, there are hypotheses that have stood the test of time over and over again that are considered to be true. Newton’s Laws, which are used everyday and have been used for centuries, can be considered facts, but even Newton’s Laws needed to be refined after some observations were found in some special cases. Newton’s Laws were refined by Einstein with his Theory of Relativity. (The refinement does not affect our everyday use of Newton’s Laws.)
Science works because we have a God who is consistent and rational in his actions. On rare occasions, God may do something out of the ordinary and those occasions are known as supernatural events. Science needs to ignore the existence of God, because if I drop a pencil the pencil will go wherever God wants it to go, but the fact that God is consistent and rational means we can assume the pencil will fall to the ground. This means science is not at odds with God. It also means that science has a limited view of reality. Science cannot see the supernatural.
And it needs to be noted that science describes the how and not the why something happens. We usually equate the how to the why and that is useful but it is not totally accurate. On earth a falling apple may be increasing its downward speed at 9.8 meters per second for every second (due to gravity), but that is describing how the apple is falling and not why the apple is falling. (John was mad and threw the apple over the cliff.)
Some people say they believe in science and not in God. They are not understanding what science is. They may be believing the philosophies of scientism or methodological naturalism, but it is more likely they have created their own philosophy of life and have pulled in the parts of science they like into their worldview. This is more true today in our postmodern society than it was in the modern era. People today are less likely to acknowledge the findings of science they disagree with, because they are their own authority.
We are not rational people, not anymore (if we were ever all that rational). A Barna survey showed that most Americans base truth on their feelings. A Gallup survey says 70% of our decisions are based on emotions and only 30% of decisions are rational. (Think of the automobile ads on TV. They play to your emotions without giving you any specs.) Science belongs to the modern era, so in the postmodern era science will have a smaller role in society. Today the modern “Rational Human” is being replaced by the postmodern “Self-Determined Human”.
heinsite 
You made one comment I would not make in such a universal way as you did. You wrote, “Science needs to ignore the existence of God …” so its explanations do not contradict the known laws of physics. To a large degree that’s true (miracles aside for the moment); science does need to stick to natural causes to explain purely natural phenomena … but not to the point that it contradicts common sense. So I would phrase that sentence differently, because when it comes to explaining the topic of ultimate origins, science has gone way out of its way to ignore the existence of God — to the point of absurdity. As I wrote in an e-mail on June 13, 2024 (to which I’ve added a few new comments in parentheses):
Dr. Paul Nelson, who has a PhD in the Philosophy of Science and Evolutionary Biology from The University of Chicago, discussed with Dr. Del Tackett what science should be vs. its current, purely secular state in which it’s stuck strictly and solely in methodological naturalism, and is completely unable (and unwilling) to consider anything (or anybody) outside that limited box. Tackett interviewed Nelson at The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California in 2015. This was part of the “Is Genesis History” documentary. A brief transcript of Tackett’s interview of Nelson can be read in a PDF at https://isgenesishistory.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Interviews-Paul-Nelson-at-Computer-History-Museum.pdf.
In a nutshell, if secular scientists studying the physical, natural universe cannot seriously acknowledge the possibility of an intelligence having created everything we see, and in particular cannot get themselves to even consider or admit the sheer impossibility of anything so fantastically complex as life having arisen all by itself without any exterior, causative, intelligent agent, then it’s like trying to put a puzzle together by refusing to accept all the puzzle pieces of a certain color. They will never, ever complete that picture with that mindset. If a non-human intelligence predating humanity actually did create life, the world, and the universe – as any rational appraisal of the evidence would indicate through sheer common sense, especially the more we find out about how exceptionally finely-tuned everything actually is, and how incredibly intricate the molecules and processes of life really are (full of high orders of non-random information) – then secular scientists refusing to seriously consider the possibility of a Creator will never, ever, ever arrive at the truth in their efforts to reconstruct the story of the origin of everything. When certain possibilities are excluded right from the outset, then that’s no longer strictly science. That’s science with an agenda, which is not true science at all. It reminds me of what biologist Richard Lewontin wrote in the 1990s:
“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
Billions and Billions of Demons – JANUARY 9, 1997 issue”
That reminds me strongly of something the Apostle Paul wrote almost 2000 years earlier in Romans 1:21-22 —
“For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools …”
Jeff Lemke