It's the law!
There's been quite a lot of reaction to a New York Times op-ed by Paul Davies titled Taking Science on Faith . (I read about it first on Adventures in Ethics and Science .) Davies argues that, like religion, science is ultimately based on faith. My main interest is not in his argument per se (but see here for some scathing critiques). What struck me about Davies' essay was his use of the term scientific law . He uses it again and again, whereas he refers to a theory only twice, and not once does he refer to a model . If there are laws, then presumably there's a lawmaker, and the obvious candidate would be God. If we are able to discover these laws, then we have identified Truth. Who can then disagree? Who can go against the law? This seems to me a very arrogant notion. In fact the history of science is littered with "laws" that have subsequently been overturned or shown to be special cases or approximations. For instance, Newton's laws of motion (one of whi...