On Becoming

becoming

 A willingness to be wrong is basic to science.  

It is not a desire to be wrong:  no one looks forward to that.  It is a recognition that what we understand, and how we understand, is open-ended.  We will come to a better understanding, some day, almost certainly.  

In the real world, the world we live in, things become.  They are not what they used to be.  Our understanding is like that, too.  It becomes.  

For example, think about what it is to become a human being.  

We usually say, "what it is to be" a human being, but like everything else, we become what we are.  We become.  Once, there was no me.  I have become who I am.  And I will surely not remain what I am now.  

That distinction screws up all of our debate about abortion, for instance.  The fiercest opponents of abortion insist that from the moment a sperm unites with an egg, it is a human being;  not just human stuff, but a human being.  

The fact is that one does not become a human being in an instant.  It takes time; quite a lot of time.  We become.  And there is no use to try to specify a precise moment when a dot of an egg and a wriggle of a sperm become human beings.  It is a gradual process.  There is no precise moment when an acorn becomes an oak tree.  

That is why the Supreme Court, in a rough and manageable way, said that how we think of an embryo in the first trimester ought to be different from how we think of it much later in pregnancy.  There is no magic moment.  We become.

Once upon quite a long time ago, I was a clergyman.  What was evident, particularly for religions like the one I was in, was their commitment to truth.  "The way, the life, and the truth."  My job was to explain the truth.

Catholics had their understanding of what the truth was, and Episcopalians had theirs.  We had ours.  Others made the same kinds of claims.  

When I taught ethics, I was struck by how so many accounting students had trouble with nuanced ethics.  They wanted to know what was true.  Was it a credit or a debit?  "Well, sort of. . ." did not satisfy people who wanted absolutely right and wrong for answers.  

For most religions, there is an Ultimate Authority, and the task of humans is to discover what the Ultimate Authority says about things.  If there is an ultimate authority, one probably ought to obey it, and that makes things simpler, too.  But that is to say, there is one answer, one authority, and it is not what we might think.

Science is to go with the evidence, and to doubt even it, until something more likely appears.  

It isn't a matter of objectivity, as if there were a neutral position.  It is a matter of studying the evidence, and testing it, and then looking at everything from what seems to be true.  

Then testing it, again.  Trying to disprove what it seems to suggest, something like putting your weight on it in order to know whether it is safe to walk on.  That is not an appeal to authority.  It is being a Doubting Thomas in order to find a place to stand.  And then, testing that.  Because something better will surely be the result.  

There is nothing wrong with being wrong if it is embedded in a commitment to learning what might be a better way to see things. 

There is something wrong with thinking that thinking about things is a waste of time because everything has already been answered.