We need to reach an accommodation with uncertainty. Not only is the universe uncertain, but so too is human knowledge. Science as a process should never have fostered any illusions about this: it was always about provisional truths - and knew it. Perhaps it's time for us to finally accept that we shouldn't believe in science because we think it's certain, but precisely because it's not.
Certainty is totalitarian. It forecloses further thinking. Not one of the theories devised by Newton, Darwin, Einstein or Planck is certain and perfect. Powerful and beautiful they undoubtedly are, but they are still partial and incomplete approximations of truth.
writes David Malone, an independant documentary director, in New Scientist.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Deepak Chopra and his Choprawoo translated: "Skeptics, take my ill-informed speculations seriously!"
He's baaaack.
Deepak Chopra. Remember him? It's been a while since I've said much about him and him alone. True, I've gone after him this year when he joined up with three other major league woo-meisters Dean Ornish, Rustum Roy, and Andrew Weil to try to try to help Senator Tom Harkin hijack the…
The Anglican Church has decided to apologize to Darwin for the rude manner in which their nineteenth century forebears responded to evolution. That's decent of them, I suppose.
Spearheading the effort is Malcolm Brown, Director of Mission and Public Affairs. In this article, entitled “Good…
I suppose you could, with some justification, accuse me of being a troll, given that my post "So I'm a Christian. Shoot me." generated an entirely predictable set of flames tearing me down for unscientific thinking, and for trying to claim that there is any kind of bias against the religious…
I finally got around to reading Paul Krugman's takedown of modern economics, which is a lucid dissection of his own field. His core argument is that economists made the old Keatsian error, mistaking a beautiful theory for the truth:
As I see it, the economics profession went astray because…