My pay is enough for me to put in the work expected of me. Anything else is extra, not covered by my pay (well, if I was unusually well paid, maybe, but I'm not). I have additional dedication to my employer because of how I've been treated while I've been working here. They're loyal to me, so I'm loyal to them. I agree with Penguinisto: if the employer doesn't invest in me to some extent, I don't invest in them. I do my job, and then leave when I find something better.

In some religions, the gods are created by something, so they aren't the ultimate cause. Moreover, the four forces of nature you list are not necessarily the ultimate cause of everything. Under some circumstances we have no idea how to reproduce, there's evidence that they are different, and therefore are themselves caused by prevailing conditions and more fundamental principles. Some things simply have no cause we've been able to figure out. The strong nuclear force holds atomic nuclei together most of the time, but there's no mechanism that survives scientific explanation as to why a radium atom should shoot out a helium nucleus now rather than later. Nothing explains why the Big Bang happened, and I'm not at all confident science ever can.

500 years ago would be 1514, and there really wasn't much that was really science at that time. Science as we know it pretty much got going in the 1600s. Since then, we really haven't had all that many established scientific principles overthrown, so I'd say far less than 99%. Newtonian gravity turned out to be a very useful approximation, not so much wrong as incomplete. Electromagnetic radiation was partly understood in the 19th Century, and it turns out that that part was not sufficient to explain everyday phenomena (such as black body radiation). The main wrong thing about it was the luminiferous aether, and scientists in general were not comfortable with a thoroughly rigid medium that didn't affect anything going through it but light.

I don't know who you're talking about as "people". Scientists, in my observation, are very aware that they don't know everything, and generally subscribe to the attitude you recommend, only with fewer words. How much have you observed what you call being proven wrong ending people's careers?

I suspect you're mixing up scientists, science journalists, and science fans here.

Religions do not generally hold that all truths are self-evident, and many are open to vigorous argument on all but a very few tenets. The arguments are more philosophical than scientific, but they exist.

Could you give me an example of what gravity might be, as opposed to what it does under what circumstances? I'm having real trouble envisioning what you mean. Or what any other abstract force or condition "is"?

Right now, we know that matter tells spacetime to get bent, and spacetime tells matter where to go, and we call the result gravity (it may be mediated by spin-2 bosons called gravitons). We can make all sorts of neat predictions from that knowledge. It seems to me, personally, that that's an adequate explanation.

Actually, if you had a good enough model of the Toronto area, you could determine the effects of any given transit system. The argument of light rail versus subways is scientific in the effects each has, and has to be subjective (and therefore not scientific) when determining which is better.

Similarly, climate science can tell us what is likely to happen under certain circumstances, but it can't prescribe a course of action. That's a matter of politics.

Philosophy is very much like artificial intelligence: the definition shifts over time. AI, in computer science, is approaches to problems we really don't know how to solve, because they seem to require intelligence (whatever that is). A lot of machine vision has become systemized, and hence is no longer really a part of AI. Philosophy is the study of problems we really don't know how to solve, and science has become systemized and hence is no longer really counted as philosophy. (We can consider science one of philosophy's success stories.)

The scope of science is limited to that which we can objectively observe and, to some extent, measure. If you and I drop a ball, the drops will be similar and can be verified by a third party. If you and I pray for divine enlightenment, we may get very different results, and a third party can't verify anything. It might be possible to verify that a certain class of people will usually have more altruistic behavior and different emotions after a given course of prayer or meditation, but whether that's due to God or not is not a scientific question.

It may, however, be the best we can do. Randomness doesn't presume a causal world (there is no known answer to "What causes this particular atom to emit a beta particle now?", so causality is a matter of faith rather than science). Like much of science, it's not something that's proven, but something that is impossible to disprove while causal hypotheses are disproven. It's compatible with the idea that some sort of higher power is making the choices in what appears to be a random way but is directed to an end. In other words, we can't prove that God created us through evolution, but we can't disprove it either.

Deriving arithmetic from more fundamental principles is going much more abstract than I'd want in a K-12 class. Algebra and geometry are the earliest classes I tend to consider "math" rather than "arithmetic", and I think that works nicely.

Of course the Fourth Amendment cases don't talk about statutes. The Constitution trumps any legislation. That doesn't mean there can't be statutes that make certain types of searches explicitly illegal.

Article I, Section 8, last paragraph: "To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof." This means that Congress can pass laws concerning law enforcement, and can have laws binding on the President and the Courts.

My first point was that the US idea of jurisprudence extends farther than that of most other countries.

My second is that cutting down on what we define as crimes doesn't mean we stop having crimes, and so there will always be the same justification for surveillance. Legalizing things you and I seem to agree should be legal doesn't affect that justification. The question of how much surveillance we should have is independent of what is actually illegal for most citizens to do.

I'm not basing my standard of excellence on the other guy, so much as the other guys. It would be nice not to have the moral failings, but we almost always get them. Blaming individual people for what is a species-wide failing is a losing game.

Obama didn't start the (likely illegal) Iraqi war. He didn't botch the first years of occupation. Yet now he's blamed no matter what he does about it. He pulled out on Bush's schedule, and is now lambasted for doing so. Meddling in the Middle East has long-term effects; the CIA-backed coup in Iran in the 1950s is still having effects. One term was not enough to straighten out the problems in Iraq.

Statistics is a branch of mathematics. It's fine. It is not a belief system.

Scientific observations tend to be statistical. Particle physicists referred to previous accelerators as eliminating certain mass/energy ranges for the Higgs boson. They hadn't run through every possible collision methodically, but just generated lots and lots of collisions that should eventually produce certain results if certain things were true. Quantum mechanics is statistical in nature, since you can't know everything about a given particle. The laws of thermodynamics are statistical. Temperature and pressure are statistical, since they are properties of large collections of small things. Brownian motion is an example of when the numbers of molecules hitting something are sufficiently small that the law of large numbers doesn't smooth it out fully.

In short, if you reject statistics in science, you reject a very large amount of physics. Other sciences are even more statistical. Astronomy has to figure out what it can with what it can see, and is therefore primarily statistical. It goes on.

Are you going to go to CERN and tell everybody there that they aren't doing science? I'm not.