Catholic and Loving it!

The Story So Far...

In my part one on the subject of why I reckon this Christianity business is worth wasting my time on I explained the need to start reasoned arguments with self-evident truths. If the starting point is wrong, logic and reason can only produce wrong answers. For this reason I have begun with a fact as clear as daylight...

Some things are better than others.

If this self-evident truth is not obvious to you then something has gone seriously wrong in your head. Go away and saw your own leg off (or do you think it is better not to?)

In search of better things...

My starting point with this is something even a baby can understand. Leona knows that chocolate and toys are better than bedtime and sore teeth. But we don't remain babies forever. We grow older and in the knowledge that some things are better than others, we start to look for more of the better things and we try to make them better. Learning to walk and talk helps, as does learning to read. This leads me on to a very well known fact. Knowledge is power:

The more you know about things, the better you can make things.

If you doubt this fact, compare the Ancient Roman knowledge of aeroplane construction with that of modern times. Get the idea? Roman aeroplanes were rubbish. Harrier Jump Jets are better.

In my last blog entry I wrote about Trebuchets. Let's say you wanted to build a trebuchet, you can find loads of instructions for building a trebuchet on the Internet. You can even build a paper one. Old fashioned non-internet folks can probably pick up a book on the subject from a library. Anyway, you build your trebuchet and you want it to fire huge rocks as far as possible. This leads to a question... how to acheive a better range? Maybe try a longer throwing arm or a heavier counterweight? These lead to other questions... what happens if I change the weight of my throwing arm? what happens if I use a bigger rock?

Your book about trebuchets or the internet might have the answers. But what if it doesnt? How will you ever find out what difference it makes whether you throw a dead horse or a flaming piano?

You have to try it of course...

There are some things you have to find out for yourself.

You can find a lot from books and the web but sooner or later there is going to be a piece of information that you need but nobody can tell you. Maybe you are working on the cutting edge of modern technology or maybe you want to know if pouring Raspberry Jam on your roses will make them grow better. Sometimes it might be just quicker to find out for yourself than to read several books on the more unusual methods of rose cultivation.

This might not happen to your personally very often but it happens to the Human Race all the time. How can we get to the moon? How can we cure cancer? What will happen if I fire electrons at a really thin sheet of gold foil?

Holy Electrons Batman! It look's like we're going to be needing...

The Scientific Method

It may surprise some of you to find science mentioned in a blog entry about why I bother with religious people, I know that many people have read in the newspapers and seen on the TV that because of science nobody needs to go to Church anymore. I find the whole 'science vs religion' debate incredible because it was thinking too much about science that lead me in to religion. Anyway, I digress. What is the Scientific Method?

The scientific method is a way of finding things out that nobody knows and it works really really well. Every modern invention from pocket calculators and nuclear submarines to games consoles and ipods stands as evidence that the scientifc method works. How does it work?

The scientific method works like this:

First we ask a question. Here's one: If I drop a bouncy ball it will bounce. Now... If I drop the ball from a greater height, will it bounce higher? What do you think? The ball will be travelling faster when it hits the ground so it will have more energy but if it is travelling faster then more energy will be required to slow the ball down and get it heading in the opposite direction. Hmm?

Next we construct a hypothesis. That's a posh word for "an educated guess"... we remember bouncing balls in our childhood and we definitely remember them going higher when you dropped them from higher. That's our hypothesis: "a bouncy ball dropped from higher will bounce higher".

Then we conduct an experiment. We choose a height (1 metre) and drop a bouncy ball from that height, measuring the height it bounced to. Then we choose a different height (2 metres) and drop the same ball from this other height, again measuring the height it reached when it bounced. You should now have a piece of paper with some numbers scribbled on it. This is called data. If you put it in to a computer you can make it look more impressive...

Drop Height	Bounce Height
100cm	46cm
200cm	84cm

(okay, not very impressive)

Now we analyse our data. Your data might be different from mine (because mine is completely made up) but in my experiment the ball that was dropped from higher bounced higher. There is not much analysis required here in order to come to a conclusion: My hypothesis was proved correct. If I had actually done the experiment in real life I might have got a different answer but you can only prove me wrong if you actually do the experiment and you have better things to do, right? Good.

You can now come up with new questions like "If I use a heavier ball, will it bounce higher than a lighter one?" and "If I use balls made from different materials will they bounce to different heights?" or "If I change the temperature of the ball will it bounce to the same height?". You can ask all these questions and you can do experiments to answer them... you just need to have the balls.

The Scientific Method is a good way of finding things out.

This is how science works. It's not really very complicated is it, but if you do this enough times you can find out everything about the physical world and build a helicopter or a computer or something. With this Science thing you can do anything!

Or can you?

Tune in next time when we go: Beyond Science...

Update: Part three is now online here.