"Science flies us to the moon–religion flies us into buildings"

I'm going to comment on some statements by the late Victor Stenger in The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Reason and Science (Prometheus Books 2009), 59. 

We trust scientific method, logic, and mathematics because they work. They give us answers that we can independently test against objective observations. They give us electric lights, computers, and cell phones. 

i) Is there just one scientific method?

ii) Apropos (i), seems to me that there's a distinction between great scientists and average workaday scientists. The average scientist is methodical. But great scientists operate more from intuition. Flashes of insight. Take Einstein's thought experiments involving clocks, trains, elevators, or riding a light beam. Is that a method? 

A method is reproducible. A set of instructions. Just follow the instructions. Do it yourself. 

But the average scientist can't imitate Einstein. Einstein had a remarkable knack for visualizing physics. That's not a method–that's a talent. Ironically, as Einstein got older, he became more methodical, but less insightful. 

Same thing with Newton's cannon, Schrödinger’s cat, and the EPR paradox. Is that a method? 

What about Feynman's sum-over-histories interpretation of quantum mechanics? In a sense, that's a method. But how did he arrive at that in the first place? Was there a method by which he hit on that interpretation? 

Or take this example:  

I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling. I had nothing to do, so I start figuring out the motion of the rotating plate. I discovered that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate—two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! I went on to work out equations for wobbles. Then I thought about how the electron orbits start to move in relativity.

How many physicists sitting in a cafeteria would draw that analogy? Is that a method? Great scientists employ analogical reasoning. They discern parallels which lesser scientists don't notice. Like Newton's bucket. That's a real experiment. A simple experiment. Anyone can do it. What made it special was not the experiment itself, but Newton's extrapolation. He used that as a springboard for a thought-experiment. One which, in turn, proved to be a stimulus to Mach and Einstein. 

Great scientists resort to thought-experiments, in part because that's a short-cut, and in part because the technology may not exist to perform a real experiment. So they have to experiment in their heads. For instance, the double-slit experiment was originally a thought-experiment. When Feynman proposed it, the technology did not exist to do it for real. 

iii) Do we trust logic because it works? How could we tell what works apart from logic? What works doesn't prove logic; rather, logic proves what works. There's no way to "independently test logic against objective observations," for that comparison depends on logic from the get-go.  

iv) Do we trust math because it works? If math didn't work, how could we tell? Not by taking measurements to see if math matches our measurements, for measurement depends on math.

How can we independently test math against objective observations? Suppose I observe some marbles. How many? Are there five marbles or six? Unless I have a preconception of number, I can't count how many marbles there are. Absent math, I can't register their number. How does Stenger think math works in that setting? How could he ever detect a mismatch between math and how many marbles there really are? 

Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings.

That's a catchy slogan. Appealing to the rabble. 

i) From a Christian standpoint, that's a false antithesis. Absent God, there'd be no moon, no astronauts, no rocket scientists. No electricity. God is the ultimate source of science and scientists. God is the ultimate source of logic, mathematics, and the physical world. 

ii) It wasn't religionists in general who flew airplanes into buildings. It was Muslims in particular. A very specific theology. 

iii) Yes, science flies us to the moon. Science also gives us tanks, missiles, stealth bombers, battleships, bioweapons, chemical weapons, thermonuclear weapons, and predator drones. In future, it may give us orbital weapons.