Happy Science Day March
Science is the only method people have developed where an essential element of the knowledge it produces is that it can be tested, and lasts as scientific knowledge only so long as it survives those tests. Accepting science requires the courage to know that every fact science accepts about the world is provisional, and its test is its reliability rather than its truth, because we will never be completely sure what that truth is.
Because of this unique feature, it is a poor ally for any ideology or religion claiming access to absolute truth. And so science is also the enemy of political ideologues, be they Communists regarding genetics, Nazis regarding race and physics, conservative Christians and evolution, or right wingers and libertarians with respect to ecology and global warming.
Gus DiZerega
I’m assuming Gus will not mind me quoting him, as I replied to him, no truer words were ever written.
It has only been in the last five hundred years or so, not counting a limited number of Greeks or Romans or even some Arabs for the matter, that a few men, at first, began to rise above their primitive egos to try and observe the world as it is not as they wished it to be. Now that dispassionate, yet passionate, few truth seekers has mushroomed into an army of truth seekers moving forward based upon hard facts.
Yet, Millions of humans, unable to escape the pull of their primitive egos, find the scientific method totally unacceptable. They remain stuck in a fairytale world of childish superstition. Indeed, for many, ego desire will always Trump inconvenient facts — raw truth. They gladly hand their lives over to the blather of con men and charlatans because they have no love of truth that is greater than their own ego driven emotions.
In past times men were excommunicated from their religion or even killed because they dared state truths other than those beliefs held by the mob, as dictated to it by the powers to be. And, today, with so many untruth wheedling men in places of high political power, scientists worldwide have found it necessary to protest against the fakers and liars that would see the earth destroyed by such absurdities as denying that climate change is primarily a man made process. Much of this seeming stupidity is nothing more than the result of short-term greed — lets get it all today and the heck with tomorrow. In fact nothing exemplifies childish ego in action more than this sort of insistent blindness.
And so the scientists feel they must march, hoping to nudge humankind toward a little more maturity and reality. I say, hurray and happy day to all the scientific fact finders and truth seeks.
