What is science? Maybe not what you think it is . . .

 

Skeptics and True Believers, by Chet Raymo

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“[Science is] an effective, rational instrument for discerning (tentatively, partially, but always more accurately) the facts of the world.”

– Chet Raymo, Skeptics and True Believers, p. 166

The rigorous testable hypotheses of science provide the best means to the end of a better understanding of our actual world (albeit with regular application of Ockham’s razor).  Science doesn’t pretend to absolute truth; its very tentativeness is its greatest strength, and has provided humans with material understanding far beyond anything possible via unprovable assertions. Keeping the testable, predictive models of science as simple as Ockham would ask helps to keep out the arbitrary, and improves the usefulness of the models.

Carl Sagan regarding science: "We have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth - never there, just closer and closer, always finding vast new oceans of undiscovered possibilities. Cleverly designed experiments are the key."(Skeptical Inquirer Volume 19.1, January / February 1995) 

 

Gardner's Whys & Wherefores, by Martin Gardner

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Science is mute regarding God’s existence, as God’s existence can neither be proved nor disproved. Not all practicing scientists are mute on the subject, but they are not representing anything scientific when they opine on the truth or falseness of that assertion. Martin Gardner, one who believed in the existence of God, wrote a succinct summary of the problems with logical proofs of God. In his essay entitled The Proofs: Why I Don’t Think the Existence of God can be Demonstrated, he asked, "Is it not the height of human pride and folly to suppose that our finite little brains can construct a proof that the world must be built just the way it is, or a proof that there must be a God who built it?"(Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, p. 207)