ABSTRACT
Scientific evidence can be viewed as a highly modernist concept. Modernism is the philosophical movement emerging from the enlightenment and is characterised by rationalism, materialism and reductionism. Nature follows rules that are reasonable and found by measuring features of the material world. If the material world is complex it can be understood by breaking it down by its component parts and measuring how these parts work and how they interact. In practice this philosophy results in the observation and meas-urement of the universe. The non-material world is regarded as of dubious validity, such as belief systems which are impossible to verify through observation. From many different observations general rules are looked for, with an underlying assumption that the fragments of observation can lead to the discovery of universal laws that will then predict future observations. The observers are assumed not to affect the system being observed and to be impartial in interpreting their measurements. This distance between observer and observed leads to the objectivity of the truth which is found.
