Science. I find myself surrounded by people who don’t believe in science. Believe isn’t even the right word. Science is the only thing you don’t have to believe in, that’s the beauty of it. It is so fundamental to me, that I find myself at a loss of words to explain it. People think science is just one more thing to believe, that Buddhism or Catholocism or Astrology are all equally valid. How to explain the qualitative difference between science and belief systems?
Science makes as few assumptions as possible, and acknowledges the ones it does make. It makes only those assumptions necessary to function – the ones that without them we would just never get out of bed. Such as that there is an external and knowable outer reality. Other people exist. That kind of thing. Of course you can question all that, and sometimes science even does, but not to the extent that it paralyzes you. And even while making these base, necessary assumptions, science acknowledges that they are assumptions.
Science is not a set of facts. Science is a process. It is continually humble, continually questioning its own discoveries. Just because science changes, makes new discoveries that replace old ones, does not mean it’s unreliable. It means it’s honest.
There is a prejudice against science in popular thought. Even amongst progressives, strangely. Religious conservatives are of course the enemy of science, as always. But now it seems that there is a deep misunderstanding of what science is, and why it is deeply important…Why it is the ally and a necessary element of progressive change. Somehow science itself has become equated with “the man,” with power, greed, capitalism. Hard to make people see the distinction between science itself – a way of thought, truth seeking over blind belief – and the fruits of capitalist application of science. There is an impatience, maybe, a desire to believe in spiritualism, in things beyond what science has documented, proven. We may intuit, and feel, that there is something greater than what science has already documented. But that’s no reason to reject science. If people would just be patient, science will probably eventually discover things that will far surpass what we’ve made up in our desire to believe in something greater than ourselves. People have forgotten that science is what took us out of the dark ages. What freed our minds. What allowed us to start questioning everything, stop making assumptions, blindly accepting what we are told by authority.
