Skip to main content

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.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more