Science

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Science, unlike other academic fields, is not just a body of knowledge but also a methodology for discovering and classifying knowledge. The scope of science encompasses all physical phenomena, but there is more for scientists to study than the material world and natural processes. Science falls under two scopes: natural science, dealing with the physical, natural world, and social science, dealing with society and human nature.

People who study science are called scientists, and many of them are atheists.[1] However, most of the early scientists who started many of the scientific fields, and some of history's greatest thinkers, such as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, believed in God, or some other higher power. A distinction, however, must be drawn here between the idea that is now called creationism and the religious beheld by people like Einstein. To most Christian, the thought of Einsteinian religion seems more like agnostism or atheism than it does like an actual belief in God. According to Einstein's own book "Ideas and Opinions", he did not believe in the personal God of the traditionally religious person. Rather, he believed in a deity that functioned nearly the same as the Deity found in Deism; that is, He was the being who wrote the laws of physics into the universe, but Einstein also made it clear that he did not believe in prayer or in the personal interaction between individuals and their deity. Rather, from his point of view, God was something grander than the mere humanistic concerns written into traditional religious texts such as the Bible. And although Einstein talks about God numerous times in his writings about quantum mechanics, he is actually using God as a metaphor for the way that the laws of physics ought to be - when he says, for example, that "God doesn't play dice with the universe", he really just means that the laws of physics should be such that randomness plays no role in the ultimate foundations of the physical universe - nuclei do not just randomly decay, for instance. We now know that, in fact, Einstein was actually incorrect in this point (quantum mechanics shows that things do - and quite often do - happen for no reason whatsoever.)

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