Dogma or Science?

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, La Grange, Illinois (Interior), originally uploaded by Cornell University Library.

Anything science has not proven – if it is not observable and reproducible under controlled conditions, etc, it is suspect as hogwash.

Some challenges with this kind of thinking:

Science is not a “source” of truth but there’s a danger in treating it this way, or as the title of this post says, as dogma. I’m no scientist myself, but I see science as more of a method – sort of a structure of a process. The goal is observing, discovering, and learning the truth that is already there, not to “lay down the incontrovertible truth.”

Careful scientists know their own limitations. Honest scientists say “I have no friggin’ clue” much more often than “this is how it likely is,” at least outside their given discipline, and even within their field of study “I don’t know” is much more “truthier” than offering an accepted theory. Productive scientists are curious – and I mean really curious, openly curious.

To observe something, you have to be in the right place to observe it and observing it in the appropriate context. When there isn’t enough care about knowing the limitations of the context of observation, the conditions, etc, scientists can establish the truth of all sorts of things – like spontaneous generation. I mean hey, you leave food out, you start seeing flies – obviously the flies are coming from the food right? Duh!

Like countless other times in the history of science, science itself admitted to its error. Methods of experimentation and observation evolved and more information became available and the truth of where those maggot came from was had.

“Yeah, but that was then, this is now….that was a couple hundred years ago.” A few hundred years is a speck on the timeline of human existence – especially if you listen to the scientists and not the religionists! There’s a real danger (in my mind anyway) in believing we’ve suddenly reached the pinnacle in our generation. I suggest there is an infinite amount more truth to uncover and if there isn’t we should be acting as if there is.

A little of this truth may lay in the bottom of the deepest oceans, a little more in the farther reaches of space, and much more as we explore the irreducible complexity of the stuff we’re made of and what makes everything tick and hum.