Yes, this is late. I beg your forgiveness.
As the son of a doctor and a psychologist, there was zero chance that I wasn't going to have strong opinions on the subject of science. The scientific method, rational thought, problem solving - it was how my family interacted. When discussing why my eighth grade writing scores weren't high enough, "These grades just aren't your full potential (problem). I think the problem here son is that you haven't been studying enough, but watching too much TV (hypothesis). You come home and immediately turn it on (evidence.) If you cut out the TV watching and instead spent more time studying, you'd be where you should be (conclusion)." Q.E.D.
I gladly inherited this science based world view. Cool and intellectual, I think that most things can be explained through rational thought and logic. A mystic I am not. Unfortunately for my sister, this didn't work. To her, there were far too many things that were unexplainable. The BIG QUESTIONS, like is there a god? Where do we come from? What are we here for? All of which really don't have any concrete answers caused her problems. Whenever an answer couldn't be found, distress was soon to follow. To the rest of us, they were non-issues. Why would we waste our time asking questions that we realize we will never find an answer to? This mode of thought just couldn't flow with my sister. So instead of rebelling the way most kids do - drinking, sneaking out, smoking weed - she chose the way that would cause way more problems: she became religious. Commence family uproar.
Suddenly two opposing ideologies started inhabiting the same space. Faced with the fact that members of our family had different views of reality, we had to come to an understanding. The fact of the matter is, science can't explain everything. It can't even come close. Our science as a dogma way of understanding the world had obvious holes. I came to realize that my world view was an ideology. In the search for cold hard truth, I missed the fact that there is rarely such a thing.
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I agree that science today, in its infancy, cannot explain everything, but remember that 500 years ago it couldn't explain the motions of a simple pendulum, yet today it can. As science progresses it peels back the misconceptions brought on by the baggage that was induced from our biological evolution. But at least the things it can explain can be backed up by independent experiment.
ReplyDeleteThis is rather unlike your sister's belief in the supernatural where the driving force for her beliefs are either appeals to authority or based on faith that, by definition, is not subject to align necessarily with reality. So i ask, do you believe in reality? Latour's mocking of this question shows, I think, his fear of it.
Because I believe in reality (a shared reality, not a perceptual one), I am genuinely driven to investigate it and in the process help reshape the way science is carried out. This to me is the antithesis of dogma, that science has built within it a process by which it can evolve and change over time. Although science cannot explain everything, it is the best possible way at this time to explain anything and will only continue to improve in the future.