Would you believe that this month's reading log was all but finished but that I left it at the office on my USB storage drive? You should because that's what happened. Really.
A reading log is something I can't churn out off the top of my head, especially because I can't remember the selected passages. I can barely remember the names of the books that I read.
That this month's reading log will be posted in April is a fitting end to a rather unproductive March of blogging. But all is not lost; it's just misplaced. So for now I will do something further fitting and plagiarize myself. Again. (Fit Fitter Fittest was a self-plagiarism.) This too comes from my email archive. I wrote it a few weeks ago in response to an article I was forwarded pertaining to science and theism. Yes, this has an element of Duty Calls to it. But Coworker Shafik quoted it on his blog, so at least one person enjoyed it. Perhaps you will too.
That theism is built upon faith is something that continues to puzzle many non-believers. That science is built upon questions (rather than answers) is something that continues to puzzle the unscientific.
Science is primarily concerned with the methodologies employed to explore questions regarding the observable universe. Seemingly paradoxically, science is carried out by scientists who individually are usually more concerned with the answers. Let's conflate science with the scientists no more than we shall conflate theism with sinners.
The important point about this -- science focusing on methodology rather than answers -- is that, by definition, science can never accept the supernatural. The supernatural is exactly that which cannot be explained or proved and that bars further probing and testing. To answer a question with "God" is to say: "Ask no further questions." Science cannot do this. "God" may very well be the correct answer, but science, if you'll pardon my anthropomorphism, doesn't care; it will
relentlessly attempt to qualify what can be qualified and to quantify what can be quantified.
This is why in areas in which little is known, science serves up some rather crackpot-seeming theories. They're the best ones available. Eventually better theories will come around and enhance or replace the weaker, less-substantiated ones. History is full of examples of the progression from theory to better theory. Two of the biggest and best-known cases are evolution supplanting spontaneous generation (among other ideas) and relativity improving upon Newtonian physics. Newtonian physics was even considered unbreakable law, not just theory. Nope, it turned out to be wrong in special cases. (And relativity is itself an inadequate explanation in other special cases.) Science isn't concerned with having been "wrong" once before and being "wrong" once again; it merely offers the best-fit explanation at the time and continues onward. The theists then go off and ponder frantically about the nature of Truth and of validity and what it means for a theory to be a fact. Who cares. It's all about the questions, not the answers.
1 comment:
But according to Douglas Adams we already know the answer. We are trying to find the correct question.
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