Every major development in science has been a revolution to overturn previous dogmatic explanations of our physical universe. Resistance from those in the camp which held previous power galvanizes the freshly coronated camp in their own dogma, as does funding, goals of discovery, and hopefully a good heap of empirical evidence and predictive utility. But science is not a static stone slab on which to build your home. It is sand blown away by new winds, revealing sandstone, which is eroded by water to reveal granite, which is broken by an earthquake to reveal metal, which is molten by lava to change shape... Science moves forward by questioning itself and flipping the script with honest eyes to see past the textbook and into the nature of things. Humility is power. I love the show Cosmos, but I bristled a bit at the arrogance of the portrayal of the evil dogmatic church seeking to snuff out new knowledge (which of course they did... And with violence), as if they had access to the potential that that knowledge was true. No. People vehemently oppose new ways of seeing and thinking because they seem threatening. That is self preservation and a part of nature. It is what the makers of Cosmos are doing with their own dogmas (most of which I have no problem with), but in literally caricaturizing the church as the evil bad guys always bent on destroying science (though the shoe fits the modern foot), they miss the fact that science would not exist without the historical church. It was within a philosophy of a creation created and governed by only one law-giver, and thus one set of natural laws that a science based on testing and prediction necessarily evolved. The Greeks, in separating the observable world from the realm of truth and telos and ideals couldnt do it. Churchmen did. Bacon. Descartes. Newton. Copernicus. Galileo. Kepler. Boyle. The list goes on and is very long. Cosmos winks at this fact in a few of its biographies but maintains the cartoon portrayal of faith as anti intellectual... As if science could function without some base untestable assumptions about the physical universe, or as if all its experimentation is random and unguided by specific human hopes and desires that are held by faith.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 12:30:07 +0000
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