What Is It About Theories in the Human Sciences and Natural Sciences That Makes Them Convincing
When I was very young, my science teacher taught me Charles Darwin’s evolution theory, and I never doubted that theory since Darwin is a well-known scientist and the authority in the field of biology. Until one day, I became a Christian; I need to accept another theory which is that human beings are created by God. My knowledge had a crash. I have never seen neither earlier species develop to human beings nor God creates human beings by using mud. That is when I started to question the knowledge that I have acquired from all the areas of knowledge. Why I am convinced by the theories? What do I or should I really believe?
When I was first introduced to Newton’s third law of motions which is the mutual force of action and reaction between two bodies are equal, opposite and collinear; I doubted it for a very long time. Since every time when I play roller skate and hit to a wall, I am the one who falls and got hurt, then how can I believe the wall got the same mutual force from me as well? However, one day, my teacher brought two same sized basketballs to the class. He put both of them on the floor and called two students to push the balls. When the basketballs collided with each other; both of them started to move backward. That is how my teacher proved Newton’s third law of motion and that’s when I started to believe. My sight as one of the sense perception witnessed someone prove the law and based on the past experiences, my sense perception rarely lies to me ergo I accepted something that I did not believe in natural science because of my faith in the sense perception. Also, as an IB natural science student, I knew that there is a very strict systematic methodology (observation, hypothesis, experiment, law, and theory) in natural science. If some scientist wants to find a theory form his or her observation then he or she needs to follow the methodology precisely so that other scientist could use the same method to recreate the experiment and to prove the theory.
When I was first introduced to Newton’s third law of motions which is the mutual force of action and reaction between two bodies are equal, opposite and collinear; I doubted it for a very long time. Since every time when I play roller skate and hit to a wall, I am the one who falls and got hurt, then how can I believe the wall got the same mutual force from me as well? However, one day, my teacher brought two same sized basketballs to the class. He put both of them on the floor and called two students to push the balls. When the basketballs collided with each other; both of them started to move backward. That is how my teacher proved Newton’s third law of motion and that’s when I started to believe. My sight as one of the sense perception witnessed someone prove the law and based on the past experiences, my sense perception rarely lies to me ergo I accepted something that I did not believe in natural science because of my faith in the sense perception. Also, as an IB natural science student, I knew that there is a very strict systematic methodology (observation, hypothesis, experiment, law, and theory) in natural science. If some scientist wants to find a theory form his or her observation then he or she needs to follow the methodology precisely so that other scientist could use the same method to recreate the experiment and to prove the theory.