OK.

What kind of strange laws would scientists conjure up in world without a beginning and end?

I don't really understand this. We don't know yet if the world has a beginning and an end. There are some theories of quantum gravity that suggest that the so-called big bang was really just a bounce as the universe shrank down to a very small size and bounced out again. If that was true what difference would it make to how science is done ?

I have to say "strange laws scientists conjure up" is a bit pejorative. I guess you like to think that scientists make things up. Scientists don't conjure up laws they look at the universe and observe patterns and regularities which they summarise and call laws. It's a mistake to say the universe "obeys the law of gravity" for example. It would be better to say that "law of gravity" predicts the behaviour of the universe accurately.

How would scientists ever prove anything if man could not recognize truth?

I guess they couldn't but I don't see how anyone needs Christianity to recognise truth. I would have thought that shortly after we learned to speak (estimates seem to vary from 200,000 to 2 million years ago but very BC), we would have started to think about truth as a concept as we realised you could say things that aren't true.

No, Stacy, not that. I was writing about the epistemology, not the politics.

What kind of strange laws would scientists conjure up in world without a beginning and end

We still don't know that the universe has a beginning, and we're pretty sure it doesn't have anything you'd reasonably consider an "end". Why would that make physical laws any stranger than they already are?

How would scientists ever prove anything if man could not recognize truth?

One of the reasons why modern science exists is because man in general cannot recognize truth; only by testing your theory in the real world do you discover whether or not you had it right.

MIchael, No. No. Please reread and address the questions directly. This gets at the heart of science and why it cannot be separated from ethics and virtue, which means it cannot be totally severed from religion.

Q. Quine, Are you addressing the myth that science and religions were in essential conflict, and that the Enlightenment was about ending the darkness of the Middle Ages caused by religion's grip that stifled science? I hope not. That's a terrible myth to propagate, as terrible as the myth that the Scientific Method developed independently, or in spit of, of the Catholic Church. Can you clarify what you mean here?

Consider what would happen to academic institutions if the search for truth no longer operated under the Christian mindset. What kind of strange laws would scientists conjure up in world without a beginning and end? How would scientists ever prove anything if man could not recognize truth? Science would just be some swirling quagmire of opinion.

Are you seriously suggesting that no-one understood the notion of truth until the rise of a Christian mindset ? Are you suggesting that Euclid didn't understand the concept of proof because he was pre Christian ? I suggest you have a look at his Elements. Euclid's geometric proofs have been used for centuries as a teaching tool for students.

I'll let someone else pursue the question of whether Roman's and Greek's pursued virtue in the general sense. It was my impression that they did.

EDIT: There is a nice dynamic version of Euclid's Elements here

http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.html