Tides

My buddy comes from the progressive/atheist/scientism/ wing of the human race. Imagine the little rhetorical battles we have. He is busy with job and kids, so our conversations are usually via long text exchanges, sometimes late at night, often over a number of days. While I don’t agree with him on much, the exchanges are always enjoyable and enlightening.

A recent brawl was over the notion of settled science, fired up when I sent along an article about a conclave of cosmologists in London. They were getting together to gameplan next steps. Seems the working models of the universe employed over the last 50 years or so are completely wrong. Things thought settled (like dark matter exerts a consistent pressure at all times, in all places) weren’t.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/astronomers-gather-confront-universe

Well, he parried, maybe in complex things like that, the science is not settled. But don’t you think we know for certain that the moon impacts the tides. Ahh exactly where the settled argument falls apart, confusing observation with science. Yes, we have observed that the moon impacts the tides. We have further reasoned that the gravity of the moon drives the relationship. What we don’t know is where causes gravity. Science is never settled because there is always a layer we do not understand. Scientist keep looking because they have faith that there are reasonable forces driving the universe. Faith imagine that.