SCIENCE
Science is a wonderful, wonderful thing, it’s simply best not done by humans. The human mind is thoroughly ill conceived for scientific reasoning. There are two main ways in science to gather information, the ’scientific method’ and its stricter subset ‘logic’. If people claim that there are things logic can’t investigate then they are misinformed or simply lie. Logic can investigate every-thing, the problem is that it often takes too much time then, way too much, for a human being. The point of logic is that it is infallible, logic produces undeniable truth that is impossible to be refuted at a later time. It’s far more rigorous than the ’scientific method’ which makes a lot of subtle fallacies to be easy on our infantile brains. That’s why logic is really only applied to mathematics, computer science and theoretical physics the lot. Because those sciences are ‘fundamental’, which is a really cocky word for ‘investigate very basic structures’, sure, one can apply correct rigorous logic to biology, it just takes a shitload more time so biologists like to cheat a lot more with rigour as living organisms are a bit more complicated than your average division ring.
And as a result of that, biology and chemistry and what-not is often wrong. Plain wrong, in fact, more often wrong than right it seems as the majority of things it once claimed seem to be thrown into the trash can now. They cheat on logic, let correlation imply causation too much. Say ‘If we’ve seen it five hundred times, we can then assume it’s always like that.’, biology just happily disregards the fact that the entire concept of species and life itself can trivially be shown to lead to contradictions and are thus erronous concepts logically speaking. Chemistry is working with incorrect physical models which are off a little in their result but the correct ones are just too much a bugger to work with in such complicated systems.
But hey, they never said they proved it, whereas mathematics has a concept of ‘proven’, softer sciences often say ‘proven beyond all reasonable doubt’, but apparently it has thus far always turned out wrong if they said that? And they even admit themselves that they probably currently are at this moment and they will refine it in the future. That’s at least one reasonable doubt I can name against the ‘proof’, so no, it’s not proven beyond all reasonable doubt at all. So why is it put forward then?
Point is that science is part media sensation, there is pressure to obtain results. In fact, more often than not, the fact of having a result is more important than the correctness of said result, maybe not explicitly, but since they find it likely that they are currently wrong, why bring it into the open as a discovery? At max as a rough draft I’d say. But then there is again another result, another new spectacle so that we can say to our mirror image ’species of thinkers thou art indeed’.
Take for instance the wild assumption people had in the classical until mediæval times that an object falls at proportional speed to its mass. They didn’t even know the concept of acceleration back then. Obviously this hypothesis is false as for one it’s clearly visible than an object needs some time to start accelerating and for two a simple test will show that the mass isn’t really that relevant, especially in a vacuum with no air resistance. No one even thought of testing it; Gallilei did though, he found out it was wrong, and he was pretty much ignored? That’s probably because people like it if results are there and don’t like it if you take away results, even if the results are quite simply wrong. People aren’t that good at questioning results unless they have a new even spiffier ‘read: newer’ result to take its place. Often if you find a clear flaw in a result and point it out people say ‘What else can we do then?’, well, nothing? I thought science was about investigating knowledge and truth? No answer is better than prætending as if a wrong answer is right? But having an answer, no matter if it’s clearly wrong satisfies our ego a species of thinkers, wise men with beards in toga and philosophers.
Not really, the human mind seems to have the ‘thinking’ power of using correct decuction (logic) only at the most simplest of structures like those devision rings, axiomatic set theory, nonstandard analysis and what other obscure terms I can come up with to gain internets. And most people will even be struck as if reading Cardassian if they find literature in that field, for any structure complicated enough to have any meaning to it we can no longer apply the correct deduction and have to smuggle a little with results. Apparently more than a little as thus far we’ve always been wrong.
People really seem to forget that in a lot of cases just saying ‘I don’t know.’ is really the best answer a scientist can have, but then again, most scientists are actually employees, not scientists, so I can understand.
Also, science is currently not in a position to either say that God exists or it doesn’t, same for what the origins of life are. Sure, evolution is ‘proven beyond a reasonable doubt’, but no theory of the origin of life is currently remotely falsifiable, that’s a difference. Also, evolution has nothing to do with the big bang, physicists calculate things, biologists just guess along really, educated guesses though.