Hi, Don - and welcome to the forum. No one who is interested in pursuing truth need have any fear here - it’s an interest that many of us here are passionate about ourselves. People do also quickly find, though, that if they want to promote or adhere to demonstrably false things here - it might seem a bit like a feeding frenzy to them! But … what is truth, and how can we claim to know it? That is the million dollar question that you seem to be asking of us, and also of vital importance … what might that do to faith? That question also interests many of us.
As deductive logic in math - you are correct; that is a fallacy - in that it fails to be air tight proof. But in the world of science, we don’t much traffic in ‘proof’, but rather in probability and efficacy of explanation. I.e. the inductive reasoning involved, while certainly not proof, is also not ignored by science. That means that any conjecture or hypothesis put forward is only held provisionally. It may help explain a, b, and c. But does it also explain d, e, f, and g? The more that it successfully explains, the more confidence we begin to assign to it - but still ultimately provisional, mind you! We doubt and test things because we love truth. And this isn’t just professional scientists. This is any of us who’ve survived to adulthood. Do you believe your eyes? Your ears? They don’t always tell you the truth after all. We’ve probably all experienced some defect of physical vision or of our hearing at some points in our lives. But meanwhile, any person travelling the highways and biways will not long survive in this world if they make a habit of ignoring their eyesight altogether, because so often it is correct enough about the immediate reality around us, that we rather learn to depend on it. Sure - one can point to illusions or hallucinations as evidence that “our eyes don’t work” - but if they are then wanting to throw out the 99% of the time that our senses help us navigate reality, they will no longer be safe to even just be around! We ignore physical reality at our own (and others) peril.
So, in all that sense, science is a long record of failures - yes. But science tends to “fail up”. I.e. by culling away the stuff that doesn’t work (i.e. - it can’t even make the inductive cut of explaining stuff, much less then proving anything!) then there is less falsehood left and more attention can be focused on the remaining things that are successfully explaining a whole lot. And if those things survive the onslaught of critical attention (as evolution has - perhaps more so than any other theory!), then it accrues a lot of confidence accordingly! It doesn’t mean that it explains everything or that everything about it is all nailed down and correct. But the basic explanatory framework endures and continues to be productive toward further investigation.
And we can live with you and each other too. Especially if we can all discuss with each other in good faith and genuine curiosity. But that doesn’t mean that all opinions are equal. If you put forward things here that others have empirically seen are certainly false, then (while we hope to be gracious and gentle with people involved), there will be no mercy shown to any known falsehood. And it’s hard not to take that personally if we’ve put all our important eggs into the propositional basket that others take down. That’s the difficulty for so many. They’ve been taught that biblical faith must be accompanied by certain modern understandings; and then if those modern understandings prove to be false - they then find their faith shipwrecked by all the false baggage they took on, mistaking it for important spiritual structure. And legion are those now who’ve already left the faith because they could not separate out what got so tightly bound up with their faith. Life is not a safe place for falsehoods in general. And Christian faith in particular should be no friend to falsehood either. That’s the tenacious commitment of so many here. Any friend of truth, has a lot of friends here. But promoters of known falsehoods (and physical falsehoods accessible to empirical scrutiny are the easier falsehoods to bring down) - they will probably not feel they have many friends here. But they should! Because all of us should rejoice to have our false conceptions of things removed! And it’s sad if Christians refuse to be among the leaders of such pursuit - and revealing of the content of their ‘faith’ when they aren’t.
In any case - I do hope you find some benefit here!
-Merv
