Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
First, garden variety atheists aren't militant atheists; they are dispassionate believers in fact. Militant atheists are overly-emotional and immature people as this thread proves.I just think there must be atheist books and podcasts out there that convinced garden variety atheists that all knowledge comes from scientific experiments.
To some very significant extent, science is built on philosophy, assumption, inference.
Science is based on the assumption and philosophical inference that nature is completely rationally intelligible.
Until the 1920s, a widespread scientific idea was that the universe was static and I unchanging. That was a philosophical preference, not a scientific discovery.
Until 1905 science had for centuries held the scientific idea that time and space were uniform. That was philosophy.
The multiverse is a philosophical preference that began to emerge when scientists began to realize in the 1990s that the universe is finely tuned on the edge of a razor. There is no data or experiments corroborating the multiverse.
Agreed, philosophy, and even religion, is a starting point. Most scientific advancements in ancient times were supported by religions to seek things like proving the existence of God/gods and predicting the future. An example is the Islamic Golden Age.
Scientific advances start with philosophy, but end with provable fact. Having a flawed hypothesis is one thing, but misinterpreting the data, such as the Ptolemaic model of the Solar System, can lead to further misunderstandings. Still, as history proves, better tools and continued research eventually find the truth.
Conversely, the militant atheists simply want to bitch and complain about the errors and not the eventual truisms. Sad.
