we've been here before but i can't find the past thread, perhaps someone will.
provoked by a response i just wrote:
Scientists don't have preconceived ideas
There are no assumptions beyond that the physical laws of the past were the same as those of the present.
i do not wish to distract from the posting these are taken from, it is well argued and substantially correct, more to the point, it hits the important elements where YECists in general are very wrong about science.
however, i'd like to point out that there are preconceived ideas beyond a uniformity of present and past.
the first is that science is philosophically "critical realism" which among other things says that there is a real world outside, and we all have access to it in some way, and that it is a good thing to investigate the universe. that there are no malvolent spirits that will harm us if we chop down trees for example or try to look carefully at atoms. Descartes demon is assumed not to exist.
this differs greatly from the neo-platonic ideals in mathematics for example. it also differs from most idealism which argues in an inside-out manner. That we impose our mental orderliness on a chaotic and fundamentally unknowable world.
there are several layers of assumptions needed to do modern science, several borrowed from Christianity (see S.Jaki for instance). but in general YECism has not found the sophisticated voice needed to look at these things but has mistakenly applied presuppositionalism in confusing conclusions with assumptions. for example, common descent is a conclusion from the data not an assumption that biologists use to study living things. although it can appear to be a shaping principle because of how firmly it is engrained in the scientific grid/matrix of theories.
my interest is in allowing science to look at it's real presuppositions carefully, not to overreact to the way YECism uses presuppositionalism wrongly, and deny that there are presuppositions necessary in order to do science.
i'm interested in the topic. my major interest at this moment is to understand the "moral" presupposition that doing science is a positively good thing.
this stems from the lines about Descartes demon, or sprites inhabiting trees and harming treecutters who do not do the right things to please the spirits before cutting down the trees.
this desacralization of nature was and is important to science. if, for instance, atomic scientists were afraid that demons would pop out of their experiments (i watched "black hole" this week) and wreak their world, then they would not do their science.
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