Science Does Not Reveal Truth
Paul M. Sutter Contributor
Science
Astrophysicist | Agent to the Stars
If the results can change, is it really true? FREE FOR COMMERCIAL USE (VIA PIXABAY)
What is truth?
It's a pretty popular question, apparently going back several thousand years. And over the centuries and millennia many people have tried to seek out the truth. Or reveal it. Or grapple with the truth. Or wrestle with it. Or at the very least come to terms with it.
And while science is a powerful force in understanding the way the world works, it is not truth.
To draw the distinction, there are facts. There are things we observe about the world around us. We observe the shifting of light from distant galaxies. We observe the mutations over generations in DNA. We can see chemicals combine and interact.
But science itself isn't just a collection of facts about the natural world. That's only part of the story. The bigger part of the story is what we do with those facts. And what we do is try to interpret them and understand them, and fold them into a larger picture that we can use to make predictions about the behavior of those same systems in the natural world.
And all our models and theories are representations and approximations of reality as we see it. That is not truth.
The biggest giveaway is that scientific theories change with time. As we acquire new information or new data, we have to update all of our beliefs. And how can a belief be true if it is subject to change at a moment's notice?
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Read more: Forbes
