"I want to go back to the very basics of science in this little piece, as there just seems to a surprising number of false ideas floating around about what is a scientific 'truth' and most of all what is its relationship to religious 'truths'.
The methods used by the modern science were born out of questioning and doubting the older methods of science. This relentless questioning and doubting goes on unabated in modern science.
This doubting of even the basics is applied to the most fundamental issues of basic philosophy behind the use of science and they are still regularly questioned.
However; questioning is never enough in science, as the people doing it are required to provide better ways to supply relevant information that those that are currently in use.
Of course the scientific community is in many ways elitist. When science is based wholly in established and demonstrable knowledge and information, there just cannot be shortcuts. To gather required amounts of knowledge one just needs to put a lot of hard work and dedication into it.
On the other hand the global community of scientist is incredibly open. Every person from any country in the world can become a member of this borderless universal community.
He or she can do it just by acquiring a good enough collection of knowledge and information and by studying and analyzing some aspect of our universe and publishing his or her findings based on that old knowledge and his or her new findings for the scientific community to evaluate.
However, the single most important phase of scientific exploration happens only after the publishing of any scientific study.
The reliability and worth of all scientific studies is at the end verified during the crucially important peer-review process, where people most knowledgeable in a given field look into a new study and compare its findings with the things that are already known.
A single scientist is normally gathering just little pieces of a bigger puzzle and new reliable scientific information can really come out only from fusion of new findings and of what is already known in a given field.
Therefore reporting the results of new studies as some kind of new scientific fact is very often quite misleading. On the other hand it would be odd, if old knowledge would just disappear when new ideas and findings to emerge.
A crucial part of the scientific process is always seeing how the new findings do fit in what is already known in a given field of science and creating a fusion out of old and new knowledge.
Only this process of peer-review can guarantee that in the long run the best and most reliable ideas form the basis of current scientific knowledge at any given time.
Of course this process of change in basics of a field of science can be very slow and it can take even decades. A new idea can hard to prove and the changes in paradigms are not initiated before there really is enough reason to believe that the new "truth" is better than the old one.
The new ideas can also lose out the battle to old ideas and disappear from the scene without further ado, if in the end there is not found enough evidence to back them up.
On the other hand very important fact is that the ideas of great thinkers and scientist like Socrates, Darwin or Einstein are not revered as something like a unsurpassed wisdom or even less as something like a "final truth".
The most important things is that all of these great men have declared that they found out their ideas using their own reason and the findings of earlier thinkers and scientist and not with assistance from any kind of higher force.
In science they are revered as very wise human beings, but their ideas are not seen as any kind of final truths of anything and herein lies the great insurmountable difference between science and religion.
Religions are unfortunately still build on quite different principles than science. The founders of different religions could of course have believed themselves that they have received their ideas with some kind of supernatural method from their favorite deity.
However, when religions do claim that their holy books do contain the unchanging 'final truth' they are in fact also claiming that new truths cannot emerge anymore.
The sad fact is that these ideas that are frozen in time can become a real burden to the society at large, when they are applied to societies that have very little or nothing in common with the societies in which these ideas were born.
One is just asking for trouble when the ideas over the roles of sexes or sexual minorities that are over 2000 years old are applied to a totally different societies where the ideas equality of all people are accepted and the right to exist of sexual minorities is granted.
Thanks to science we know incredibly more about ourselves, our world and our universe than in the time of the birth of modern world religions and our knowledge is expanding at astounding rate.
These incredible advances become however null and void if they are subjected to the over lordship of religious ideas that do have less and less real connections to the real world we do live in.
The methods used by the modern science were born out of questioning and doubting the older methods of science. This relentless questioning and doubting goes on unabated in modern science.
This doubting of even the basics is applied to the most fundamental issues of basic philosophy behind the use of science and they are still regularly questioned.
However; questioning is never enough in science, as the people doing it are required to provide better ways to supply relevant information that those that are currently in use.
Of course the scientific community is in many ways elitist. When science is based wholly in established and demonstrable knowledge and information, there just cannot be shortcuts. To gather required amounts of knowledge one just needs to put a lot of hard work and dedication into it.
On the other hand the global community of scientist is incredibly open. Every person from any country in the world can become a member of this borderless universal community.
He or she can do it just by acquiring a good enough collection of knowledge and information and by studying and analyzing some aspect of our universe and publishing his or her findings based on that old knowledge and his or her new findings for the scientific community to evaluate.
However, the single most important phase of scientific exploration happens only after the publishing of any scientific study.
The reliability and worth of all scientific studies is at the end verified during the crucially important peer-review process, where people most knowledgeable in a given field look into a new study and compare its findings with the things that are already known.
A single scientist is normally gathering just little pieces of a bigger puzzle and new reliable scientific information can really come out only from fusion of new findings and of what is already known in a given field.
Therefore reporting the results of new studies as some kind of new scientific fact is very often quite misleading. On the other hand it would be odd, if old knowledge would just disappear when new ideas and findings to emerge.
A crucial part of the scientific process is always seeing how the new findings do fit in what is already known in a given field of science and creating a fusion out of old and new knowledge.
Only this process of peer-review can guarantee that in the long run the best and most reliable ideas form the basis of current scientific knowledge at any given time.
Of course this process of change in basics of a field of science can be very slow and it can take even decades. A new idea can hard to prove and the changes in paradigms are not initiated before there really is enough reason to believe that the new "truth" is better than the old one.
The new ideas can also lose out the battle to old ideas and disappear from the scene without further ado, if in the end there is not found enough evidence to back them up.
On the other hand very important fact is that the ideas of great thinkers and scientist like Socrates, Darwin or Einstein are not revered as something like a unsurpassed wisdom or even less as something like a "final truth".
The most important things is that all of these great men have declared that they found out their ideas using their own reason and the findings of earlier thinkers and scientist and not with assistance from any kind of higher force.
In science they are revered as very wise human beings, but their ideas are not seen as any kind of final truths of anything and herein lies the great insurmountable difference between science and religion.
Religions are unfortunately still build on quite different principles than science. The founders of different religions could of course have believed themselves that they have received their ideas with some kind of supernatural method from their favorite deity.
However, when religions do claim that their holy books do contain the unchanging 'final truth' they are in fact also claiming that new truths cannot emerge anymore.
The sad fact is that these ideas that are frozen in time can become a real burden to the society at large, when they are applied to societies that have very little or nothing in common with the societies in which these ideas were born.
One is just asking for trouble when the ideas over the roles of sexes or sexual minorities that are over 2000 years old are applied to a totally different societies where the ideas equality of all people are accepted and the right to exist of sexual minorities is granted.
Thanks to science we know incredibly more about ourselves, our world and our universe than in the time of the birth of modern world religions and our knowledge is expanding at astounding rate.
These incredible advances become however null and void if they are subjected to the over lordship of religious ideas that do have less and less real connections to the real world we do live in.
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