Scientific fact vrs. religious faith?

[skepticscott]

27. Sorry, Charles...there is no "raging debate"

between relativity and quantum mechanics. You've either grossly misrepresented your conversant or grossly misrepresented what he said. Both of those theories have been tested against observable reality uncounted times and in numerous ways, and have been found to conform to an incredibly high degree. So high, in fact, that the chances of either of them being fundamentally wrong are so astronomically small as to not even be worth considering. The "debate" is over how to reconcile the two theories in the areas where they overlap, since the assumption that there IS such a reconciliation, as yet undiscovered, makes far more sense than the idea that one of the theories will have to be discarded as completely wrong. Einsteinian relativity did not render Newtonian mechanics "wrong" and require it to be discarded. It merely showed why it was incomplete, and explained things that classical mechanics could not. For most things, Newtonian physics still works very, very well.

To say that relativity and quantum mechanics are based on "unprovable faith claims" is so ludicrous that I can't even begin to tell you. If your friend the "sub-atomic physicist" got up at a scientific meeting and said that, he'd be hooted out of the room, if not out of the profession.

The difference between science and religion, Charles, is that religion always sees in a very dim mirror. Theologians can argue forever over what god is like, what hell is like, who will go to heaven, and consensus may even change or evolve on those points, but in the end, they have no way of knowing which version of things is actually closer to the truth. The vision of science, on the other hand, gets steadily clearer and more accurate as time goes on. Scientists are NOT in the same boat as religion..our boat is making progess, and yours just drifts aimlessly.