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Articles

Science and Non-Science

Pamela Irvin Lazorko briefly introduces what demarks science from non-science.

The modern world has seen technological wonders multiply rapidly, made possible through an accumulation of scientific discoveries about the natural world applied in practical ways. Because of the successes of its applications, science has become humanity’s preferred means of collecting, evaluating, and organizing knowledge. This is possibly why the mantle of ‘scientific’ can confer a measure of certainty to any postulate or undertaking. Yet there remain conflicts, competing visions of truth, between those ideas fielded by the practitioners of science and, for example, its theological competitors. A question to be answered then is, What is science? – and by opposition, What is non-science?

Scientific Methods

In earlier eras, the human desire to explain natural phenomena linked what was observed with preconceived notions of the world taken from mythology, religion, and philosophy.

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