Bad Boomer's Place

There has been a disturbing trend over the last few years towards discounting science as the one and best explanation of reality. The motivations behind this range from the honest but misguided, to the dishonest and deceitful.  The two most well-known examples are the debates over evolution and global warming.  The debate over evolution has been around the longest, and mostly comes from religion.  Opposition to the facts on global warming is mainly political with the hidden agenda of not passing legislation that would force industry to clean up its act.

Regardless of the source and motivation, trying to reduce the validity of science to the level of faith, assumption, rationalization or what someone wants to be true is idiotic and dangerous.  This is not to say that everything coming from science should be blindly accepted without skepticism.   Science itself is full of skepticism.  But science is a structured, prolonged, redundant, careful, and logical process of observation, analysis, theory, testing, and experimentation.  There is no such thing as a final truth in science.  All facts, scientific laws, theories, and conclusions are open to reevaluation in the presence of new information.

For something to become scientific "fact," or a scientific law, it has to be proven through scientific investigation, experimentation, and analysis.  And, the results have to be duplicated over and over by many different scientists in different locations.  And even then, if new information comes to light, things change.  An existing scientific theory can become a subset of a new theory, true only under the limited conditions of the original theory (the new larger theory includes the new information).

So, there may be a lot of truth in religion and faith, but when it comes to what we KNOW is true, science is the best source.  Science and religion do not need to be mutually exclusive in any case.  But when people start talking about a few fringe "scientists" who deny things like global warming as if their opinions carry the same weight as the thousands of mainstream scientists who agree on global warming, that is dangerous.  When we start teaching creationism in schools as an equal "theory" with evolution, that is dangerous.  A new Age of Darkness is something we should avoid!