Saturday, August 10, 2013

Science Believes

Science believes. It believes that something is knowable - otherwise, why bother. It believes that knowing matters, perhaps because knowing can or should make life better.

Science believes that knowing is based on verify-ability. If believes that if you can verify something, it must be true. And, it can tend to believe that if something can't be verified, it isn't true. This is where science falls in love with itself and begins to work against itself, because science is based on the ethos of verification.

Here science claims a corner on truth; it strives to provide evidence for it. The reality is that truth simply is. And, only some of it is knowable. Science is an attempt to know it and, at times, a good attempt. But, it remains highly subordinate to truth. Good science likely always supports truth, though not necessarily the other way around.  It has discovered, at a human level, many rather amazing things.  And, it has often discovered that what it thought it had discovered was actually wrong.  Science, after all, is another form of the quest of the human spirit, subject to the limitations of the investigator, to interpretation, and to mis-interpretation.

Besides, Twain wasn't too far off when he said:

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

-- Mark Twain

Science, among other things, is still belief.