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Science
Every organism survives by obtaining resources from its environment, by avoiding danger, and by reproduction. Knowledge is essential to each of these activities. Life at every level is an endless cycle of sense, think, act, sense ... . As Aristotle wrote at the beginning of his Metaphysics, "All people naturally desire knowledge". Darwin explains this natural desire: knowledge confers fitness.
In day to day life, the value of a particular item of knowledge is very subjective. For an organism looking for water, or trying to avoid it, the discovery of water is important. Otherwise it might be ignored. Investors are much more likely to be interested in the price of stocks that they own, or plan to buy, than all the others. People are much more likely to seek information about someone they find attractive than all the other inhabitants of the earth.
We might call such moment to moment knowledge concrete. I need to know this nail and this piece of wood in order to aim this hammer blow to move closer to my goal of a snugly driven nail. Scientific knowledge, by contrast is abstract. It applies not to this nail, but all nails, not this hammer blow but all hammer blows and so on.
The beauty of abstract knowledge is that it compresses a lot of experience into a very compact form, easy to use and remember. So Isaac Newton captured the essence thousands of years of planetary observation in his succinct mathematical expression of universal gravitation.
Two features of humanity work together to distill science from the everyday concrete knowledge. First, we can learn, so that repeated encounters with similar situations increase the clarity, detail and certainty of our knowledge.
Second, we live in communities, so each person can share in the experience of others, adding to the knowledge of all. A functioning community has a far higher chance of survival than a lone individual because of its superior ability to know and act.
The invention of writing added another dimension to human learning, memory and communication through time. Writing serves as an archetype of science, since the development of written language required careful analysis of the sounds of speech so as to give them symbolic representation. With written language dawned the thousands of years of recorded scientific tradition upon which we stand and build.
We see the growth of science an an evolutionary process. For every scientific question there is a community devoted to its answer. Within this community data and ideas are generated and shared. Every now and then someone achieves enough clarity to document their vision. This document joins the scientific literature, to become a foundation for further progress.
Formally, science is might be defined as knowledge gained by the scientific method. In practice, the scientific method at any point is simply all that has gone before. Each step forward takes a critical view of the story so far, looking for strengths and weaknesses, and then builds on the strengths.
Many would deny that theology is a science, because its content is determined more by the needs of large religious institutions than by the genuine search for knowledge. Such institutions often decree that their collective knowledge is absolute, in no way subject to evolutionary change. In this they are kidding themselves. Theology has a history, like every other science.
Here we are trying to add a little to that history by stepping away from the absolutist, authoritarian book based approach to theology and seeking to emphasize its evolutionary nature. The authoritarians claim privileged knowledge of god's secrets. We say that god is open to us all, an element of every human experience. We can all contribute to theological science.
Books
| Bronowski, Jacob, Science and Human Values, Harper and Row 1972 Jacket: 'A classic collection of essays on the theme of science as an integral part of the culture of our age, ... by Dr Bronowski, a renowned leader in the modern movement for scientific humanism.' First given as lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, February and March 1953. Amazon back |
| Galilei , Galileo , and translated by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (translated by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio) , Dover 1954 Jacket: 'Despite the fact that this book encompasses thirty years of highly original experimentation and theorizing on the part of this singular man, it is eminently readable. Written as a discussion between a master and two students, it sets forth its hundreds of experiments and summarizes the conclusions Galileo drew from these experiements in a brisk direct style. Using helpful geometric demonstrations, Galileo discusses aspects of fracture of solid bodies, cohesion, leverage, the speed of light, sound, pendulums, falling bodies, projectiles, uniform motion, accelerated motion, and the strengths of wires, rods and beams under different loadings and placements. Not only does the book display the genius of one of the makers of our civilization, but it also presents, for the historian of science, considerable information about Renaissance misapprehensions which Galileo refuted.' Amazon back |
| Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, and (photographs by Roland Michaud), Islamic Science: An Illustrated Study, World of Islam Festival Publishing Company 1976 Jacket: ' ... Basing himself on the traditional Islamic concept of science and its transmission and classification, the author discusses various branches of the Islamic sciences from cosmology, geography, and other qualitative and descriptive sciences to the mathematical sciences which include arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, geometry, astronomy and music as well as certain branches of physics. .. The author then turns to the application of the Islamic sciences ... . In the final section of the work the author discusses the role of man in the Universe, the equilibrium between man and nature and the integration of the sciences of the Cosmos into the total scheme of knowledge drawn from the Quranic revelation. ... .' Amazon back |
| Needham, Joseph, Science and Civilisation in China (Volume 1) Introductory Orientations, Cambridge UP 1954 Jacket: 'This is the exciting first instalment of a comprehensive work ... The author has set himself to interpret the Cinese mind in Western terms, and he is perhaps unique among living scholars in possessing the necessay combination of qualifications for this formidable undertaking. The practical importance of Dr Needham's work is as great as its intellectual interest. It is a westerm act of "recognition" on a higher plane than the diplomatic one.' Arnold Toynbee, The Observer, London. Amazon back |
| Pais, Abraham, 'Subtle is the Lord...': The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford UP 1982 Jacket: In this ... major work Abraham Pais, himself an eminent physicist who worked alongside Einstein in the post-war years, traces the development of Einstein's entire ouvre. ... Running through the book is a completely non-scientific biography ... including many letters which appear in English for the first time, as well as other information not published before.' Amazon back |
| Popper, Karl Raimund, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1972 Preface: 'The way in which knowledge progresses, and expecially our scientific knowledge, is by unjustified (and unjustifiable) anticipations, by guesses, by tentative solutions to our problems, by conjectures. These conjectures are controlled by criticism; that is, by attempted refutations, which include severely critical tests.' [p viii] Amazon back |
| Popper, Karl Raimund, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1992 Jacket: 'A striking picture of the logical character of scientific discovery is presented here ... Science is presented as ... the attempt to find a coherent theory of the world composed of bold conjectures and disciplines by penetrating criticism.' Amazon back |
Click on an "Amazon" link in the booklist at the foot of the page to buy the book, see more details or search for similar items
Related sites:
Concordat Watch
Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty
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