Science Gives Us An Accurate Picture Of Our World
The world is not always what it seems. This is especially obvious when you compare how we thought about the world only a few hundred years ago, and how we understand it to work today. It is easy to lose perspective on what it was to live in a world before modern science. People often died young, mostly of diseases easily prevented by good public heath practices. What we would consider modest distances between people presented difficult, often insurmountable barriers. Mountains, oceans, weather, language, economics all conspired to keep us separated and ignorant of one another.
The mechanics of everyday life (why leaves were green, why the sky was blue, where the wind came from, what the stars were made of) were all unknowable, and the subject of wild (inaccurate) speculation.
Science Improves our Everyday Existence
Every time we use a telephone or the internet, take an airplane ride, listen to digital music or enjoy clean drinking water, we owe a debt to science – because science drives the technologies that transform our world.
Without science, there would be no plastics, no antibiotics, no airplanes, automobiles, lasers (so no DVD's or supermarket scanners) – we couldn't even feed the burgeoning population of our planet without the basic research into how the world works that science provides.
Science is a tool, and a powerful one. The proper use of science requires a strong, broad community to guide the policies and priorities of the scientific community, and to help channel the fruits of science into the technologies that build better, more meaningful lives. In order to play that role, we all need a good grounding in science and technology, to help us grasp the benefits and pitfalls of science.
Science Invites Us To Awe And Wonder
Science unveils a world beyond our imaginings– drawing us beyond the day-to-day world we live in, towards amazing variety and potential. Understanding how the world works has not robbed us of mystery, or awe or the capacity to wonder. Rather, as we struggle to uncover how the world works, we are confronted with endless variation and beauty, both subtle and grand.
It turns out that the universe is much more complex and diverse than anyone ever imagined. From the behavior of quarks, to the light-years-spanning nebula seen by our space-based telescopes, from 350,000 species of beetles to the intricate beauty of DNA's double helix, our world has amazed us with its variety, complexity, invention and resiliency.
Science challenges our pre-conceptions about how the world works, and invites us to explore new possibilities, new options, new answers. In the process, we learn about how we impact the world and our community. The world is connected in amazing ways – ways that we would never discover, if not for science.
Science Does Not Take the Place of Ethics or Values
While science concerns itself with “how,” ethics, faith, philosophy struggle with questions of ultimate meaning, and the wisdom or folly of our actions. Science can inform those discussions, but science does not take their place.
At best, science is a tool that we humans use to better understand our world. Like any tool, the kind of value we get from it depends on how we use it. If we use science with skill and wisdom, it enhances our life and understanding. Science is an important window into the world in which we live. To understand science is to better understand our world, our selves and our future.
OK, So What’s The Issue?
Some people have reached conclusions about what the world is like, and they object when their preconceptions are not supported by science. Sometimes we accept this this corrective and revise our perspectives of the world to align with new information. Sometimes, we attempt to discredit, marginalize, or even manipulate science to support our preconceptions. This is a mis-use of science, and results in spreading mis-information about the world. Bad information can lead to improper conclusions. What is worse, these kinds of artificial controversies damages science’s reputation, and results in fewer people studying science, weakening our ability to compete globally and address pressing problems.
Science should be left alone to answer questions about how the world works, free from dogmatic prescriptions about what science can and cannot discover. Questions of ultimate meaning (Why) should be left to philosophy and religion.
(revised 3/30/07)
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3 comments:
You say that science improves our everyday existence, but you are going to have to deal with the fact that it has also endangered our existence itself.
Atheists scientists (since the latest gure Richard Dawkins claims most scientists are atheists) have provided weapons that could virually exterminate humanity or, at the least, poison the gene pool for a millenia, and the have willingly worked on these for every vicious government on the planet.
You say that science can not provide a basis for ethics. Exactly, and look at what they have done.
Oppenheimer summoned it up when he told President Truman that he...Oppenheimer...had blood on HIS hands.
A lot of us are concened about this...when we bring it up we are ridiculed and banned but if you don't deal with it, it will remain a cancer gnawing at your own position.
I don't ignore it, I don't refuse to deal with it. I also notice you are happy to use the fruits of science (like the Internet).
I think we should all become better educated in issues related to science so we can make better informed decisions.
Life presents us with hard choices - sometimes we make good decisions, sometimes we don't. What we can't do is give up and walk away, leaving the hard decisions to people we don't know or trust.
Besides your nager, I am not sure if you are making a specific point, or have a particular issue with science. Do you really think that scientists are a unified group, working fo the ill of the world? Teachers, doctors, lawyers, loggers, potters, plumbers, engineers, soldiers all have worked for "every vicious government on the planet." Does this make their profession uniquely wicked?
Do you have a sugestion for making science more ethical? For controlling the power of vicious governments? Is supressing science part of that plan?
Yes, science must be suppresed until we develop ethically.
Otherwise scientific "advances" will be used either to enslave or destroy humanity.
Bertrand Russell, in Has Man a Future, said that the scientists who worked on nuclear weapons were the most evil men in history.
They must be stopped.
Whatever it takes.
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