Today a very serious and intelligent fifteen year old asked me whether I thought that science is a form of religion. I was immediately wary – I didn’t know what form of rhetoric he had been listening to, and I worried that there might have been a political slant to his question of which even he himself was unaware.<\/p>\n
I told him I thought that in some ways science is the opposite of religion, or at least the opposite of faith. If you’re doing science honestly, then you can’t be influenced by any pre-expectations of what you might find. If you drop a rock from a height and it falls, you need to report that. If next week the same rock hovers in mid air, you need to report that as well, no matter how emotionally disturbing you might find it.<\/p>\n
Then the young man suggested that this view might also be a form of faith – a faith in science. I told him that he might be using “science” as a buzzword. In a sense science is just codifying what we all do every day, all the time. We look at what exists around us, and we react to what we actually see in the world.<\/p>\n
What I meant by this was that when we walk we place our feet where there is firm ground, we choose to pass through doorways and not through solid walls, and we drink water but not gasoline. We simply form a model of everyday reality, by inferring from the evidence in front of us. Science starts there, and does not stray from that mentality.<\/p>\n
Then he asked “But aren’t both science and religion a search for truth?” I responded that the problem here is that “truth” is an overloaded word, with multiple meanings, so a question like that doesn’t end up asking anything.<\/p>\n
There are real and serious reasons that we try to find emotional sense in the world around us. We grapple with the enormity of birth and love and death, we try to come up with core principles to guide our relationships with each other, we see inequity and suffering in the world and try to understand what we should do about it. Religion helps many people to navigate these difficult and deep waters, although others try to navigate them without religion.<\/p>\n
But science doesn’t deal with any of those issues. Scientists may, because they are human, and to be human is to grapple with metaphysical, moral and emotional questions. Scientists can be religious, just as they can be good citizens. But when scientists are engaging with these questions, that is not the “science” part of what they do. A scientist might be deeply motivated by a desire to alleviate suffering, but she cannot let those emotions replace an honest evaluation of what she is measuring, lest she find that she has merely engaged in pseudoscience, and has failed to help anyone.<\/p>\n
Conducting science can be a scary business, because we may discover that the Universe doesn’t care a fig about us, that it is a cold and heartless place devoid of any meaning other than the emotional shadings that we ourselves provide. To engage in science means to be prepared to look honestly at the Universe, whatever the emotional distress one might feel at the outcome.<\/p>\n
And then to keep looking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today a very serious and intelligent fifteen year old asked me whether I thought that science is a form of religion. I was immediately wary – I didn’t know what form of rhetoric he had been listening to, and I worried that there might have been a political slant to his question of which even … Continue reading “A question about science”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=760"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":773,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760\/revisions\/773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}