Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
These surveys clearly show a decline of declared belief in a personal God during
that period. A similar unpublished survey was carried out among Fellows of the
Royal Society in Britain in 2006 and obtained a similar result - the incidence of
supernaturalists is less than 10% among those Fellows who responded to the survey
(about 25% of all the Fellows contacted). But interestingly, this is a recent trend,
and if we look further back in the history of science, we see a different pattern.
We need first to ask the question - who was the first scientist in the modern
sense?
What I mean by this is - who is the first person we know about who used the
basic experimental methodology that modern scientists use? Figure 2.6 provides the
answer and lists the basic steps in the experimental method.
Fig. 2.6
To be a scientist you have to be curious about the Universe and ask questions
about aspects that you do not understand. You have to concentrate on a particular
problem that looks to be of a manageable size, and imagine possible explanations.
You then devise experiments to test these explanations, and ask whether the natural
world behaves in accordance with one or other of your ideas. You usually have to
modify your ideas to accommodate the results of the experiments, using Occam's
razor as a guide.
This procedure is not foolproof nor is it guaranteed to give you the correct
answers. Occam's razor can mislead you if, for example, the correct explanation
is not among the possible explanations you have imagined. Thus the methodology
of science is not a surefire recipe; its successful use requires not only intelligence,
but also creativity and imagination, and the honesty to admit mistakes when you
make them.
