Today we live in a world where the powers of mantras and prayers have diminished in their strength, to be taken over by logic and reasoning. We are now in the world of science, where questions that were earlier thought of as being unanswerable or having divine origins are currently being poked using the algorithm of “scientific method.”
Understanding nature has been one of the curiosities for early men. Pondering over the daily phenomenon and learning through experience with knowledge passing down the line, humans tried to gather information about the world predictably. Curiosity flavored with logic gave rise to Philosophy whereas fear backed by the necessity of a divine power ended up in Religion. Then the need to clarify and provide pieces of evidence offered a way to experimentation, and the field of Science emerged. Sometimes supported, sometimes opposed by the former two fields, science has entered in its full glory into the 21st century.
Science is neither good nor bad. Science is merely a process of gaining knowledge, understanding the world. What could be good or bad is the application of this acquired knowledge: the technology. With “science” being a buzzword today, people often end up blaming the scientists for the evil technological applications of their work. The problem becomes particularly more serious when the very “textbooks of science” ignore the difference. However, I am not going through this in my present article.
What I want to press on is a more severe problem of “Scienticism.” Scienticism is basically a belief, prevalent not only among commons but also among scientists, that the answers given by science are always true and hence to be believed upon. However, science doesn’t necessarily always provide answers that are true. To put it straight, science never “proves” anything. What it does instead is to prove that the converse of the statement is false. Hypotheses become theories when backed up by evidences. However, theories may fall off. A single evidence that reports a flaw in the theory breaks it down. Newton’s Gravitational Theory was supported by experimental evidence for over 200 years until Einstein came up with his General Theory of Relativity to address the flaws.
Crudely stating, science is malleable. Scienticism ends up the very nature of science to be plastic. Science is not about finding the answer to a problem but about finding an answer that is closest to being accurate. Perhaps this is what makes science beautiful and unique of its kind.
Scienticism could be thought of as superstition in its new form. Eradicating it is a need of today.
References:
1. http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/science-scientism
2. https://www.al-isam.org/islamic-thought-book-one-muhammad-saidi-mihr-amir-divani/introduction-religion-modern-world#scienticism
3. Wikipedia
4. What is Theory? Jim Stewart, Victoria Harte and Sally Sambrook
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