Wow. The author posted thousands of words, and missed the key difference between mathematics and science. Science must be empirical -- it must compare its theo

Wow. The author posted thousands of words, and missed the key difference between mathematics and science. Science must be empirical -- it must compare its theories with objective reality, in practical tests. If the tests fail, the theory that led to the tests must be abandoned. On that basis, science is falsifiable by reality-test, and any theory, however well-established, may be falsified by new evidence, in perpetuity. There are any number of examples in the history of science where a well-established theory, after prevailing for hundreds of years, was falsified by new evidence. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory Quote: "The strength of a scientific theory is related to the diversity of phenomena it can explain, which is measured by its ability to make falsifiable predictions with respect to those phenomena." Mathematical conjectures and theorems do not have to be compared to reality, only to other formal axioms and theorems that are part of mathematics -- this means mathematics only requires internal consistency. On that basis, mathematics is not a science. It is vitally important to science -- without mathematics, much of modern science would collapse. But mathematics is not itself a science. Before my readers object that this is all too clearly defined, and (as I often hear) philosophers are in disagreement about what science really is, I have to remind people that religious groups would like to teach Creationism in public school science classrooms, but in order to do that, they have to redefine science to suit themselves. The key property of science that keeps religious beliefs out of the classroom are the requirements for empirical tests and falsifiability. Take away these requirements, and we lose any practical, meaningful definition of science. Science is very clearly defined, and it is not a suitable debating platform for philosophers, or for religious True Believers.