What is "Science" anyway?

Today’s field report from the font lines is a series of quotes from prominent thinkers among the ranks of naturalists, uniformitarians, and atheistic scientists.

The secular agenda becomes more and more clear with each passing day.
Humanity seeks to further distance itself from the notion of a higher authority…almost as if they could WILL God away by denying His existence.

It would be humorous if it weren’t so tragic.

How can I prepare you for what is coming?

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil 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 an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
~ Richard Lewontin; evolutionary biologist

Source:
R. Lewontin, Billions and Billions of Demons, New York Review (9 January 1997): p. 31




“Our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective ‘scientific method,’ with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots is self-serving mythology.”
~ Stephen Jay Gould; author and prominent spokesperson for atheism

Source:
S.J. Gould, Natural History 103(2):14, 1994




“… science is not as empirical as many scientists seem to think it is. Unobserved and even unobservable entities play an important part in it. Science is not just the making of observations: it is the making of inferences on the basis of observations within the framework of a theory.”
~ David Hull; philosopher of science

Source:
D. Hull, The Effect of Essentialism on Taxonomy Two Thousand Years of Stasis (II), British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 16(61):1–18, 1965.




“Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.”
~ Dr Scott Todd, an immunologist at Kansas State University

Source:S.C. Todd, correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423 (30 September 1999)