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Where Do Flowers Come From?

"Science" is both a very plain, and an extremely complex exercise.  Science is to try to understand the world, using our brains.

Science forms hypotheses:  tentative explanations for something.  A hypothesis is an invitation to test an idea.  Right from the beginning, science admits that it is damned difficult to understand things, and that no idea should go untested.

"What," science asks, "would show that this hypothesis is false?"  If someone, anyone, can think of a reason why the idea cannot be true, everyone groans and cheers.  They groan because they want to understand, and hoped they had found something.  They cheer because they do not want to support something that cannot be true.

When a tentative proposal for how something works stands up well to the scrutiny of fact, it sometimes gets elevated--linguistically--and is called a theory.  A theory is just a hypothesis that has taken on all comers, and is still standing.  So we have, for instance, a theory of evolution.  That is a really tough theory.  Or Einstein's theories of special and general relativity about space and time.

At bottom, scientists accept that every hypothesis, every theory, is only tentative, because if anyone can think of a better explanation, they groan and cheer again.  When a scientist says that something is true, they really mean to say, "so far as we know now".  Some ideas are really short-lived, and some are very durable, but none of them is granted immunity from someone with brains and reasons.

That is a very different way to think than how most of us grew up, traditionally. "Traditionally" means. "because someone said so":  our parents said so, the Elders said so, the Preacher said so, the Bible said so, the Pope said so, Benjamin Franklin said so, the Constitution says so, everyone says so, God says so.  God:  that's the biggest say-so.  If you believe God said so, it does not really matter what anyone else says.

"Said-so" ideas are very different from scientific ways of thinking.  People who rely on "said-so" ideas--ideas that appeal to some authority who said so--think they have already found absolute truth.  Scientists, by the very nature of the way they think, are not only willing to doubt things they hear:  they are committed to doubt as a way to find better ways of thinking.  People who appeal to authority, to "said-so" ideas, hate doubters, and try to train themselves not to doubt, because doubt almost always comes up with something better.  Reason is a very abrasive polish.

 The people who glibly say that Creationism and "creation science" and "intelligent design" ought to be taught alongside scientific theories in school are really saying that the scientific method of trying to think of better ideas, and of testing every idea with facts is just an option; and that the alternative way to understand things is what God says.  (Everybody has a different ideas of what God says, but that is just a bother.)  Science says, "Use your brains, and figure it out!", and religion says, "We know because God says-so."

 There are no catechisms in science classes.  I recall that I almost flunked out of catechetical class:  I could not memorize the answers.  Finally, we came to an understanding:  if I could memorize an answer, they would ask me that question.  That is most certainly true.  But it isn't science.  

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