Science and religion, part 2

Link to part 1

Science sees itself as superior to religion precisely because it is so much less certain of itself than religions are. Scientists believe that their model of reality is the best that humanity has ever found, precisely because they have always accepted that it is not synonymous with The Truth and probably never will be; that we can only approach The Truth in successive approximations.

Scientists also accept that almost anything is possible. Science might one day literally find God, sitting out there in an eleven-dimensional quantum workshop building Universes from scratch. That's just one in a nearly unlimited ocean of possibilities. The only hard limits on that ocean are that the scientific model must always be consistent with empirical observations. A softer, but still fairly reasonable limit is that new theories should be consistent with the best-established ones we have now. Currently, I can think of four:

• Quantum mechanics: All matter and energy are made up of tiny entities that can behave as either particles or waves.



• Relativity: The speed of light is always the same, no matter how you observe it. If you travel very fast relative to the world around you, then space, time, and gravitational forces will appear to distort so that you still see beams of light traveling at the same speed.



• The standard model of cosmology: Planets orbit stars, billions of stars make up a galaxy, and there are at least hundreds of billions of galaxies in the Universe. The Universe began as a tiny speck about thirteen to fourteen billion years ago and has been exploding outward ever since.



• Natural selection: Through genetic variation and survival of the fittest organisms, all the diversity of life on Earth arose from a few simple primordial species which arose spontaneously about four billion years ago.

Note that all of these theories seem to run counter to everyday experience; they have only become so well-established because scientists learned to make the right kinds of observations. The fact that most people never get to make these kinds of observations firsthand is a major impediment to the popular acceptance of the scientific worldview.

Now, while scientific theories are always subject to change, that doesn't mean that change is easy. If you make a claim like "Everything we know is wrong and the world is just an elaborate simulation," or "The gaps in the story of evolution on Earth should be filled by invoking an intelligent designer," or even "Global temperatures are rising so fast that human influence must be the dominant cause," then you are making an extraordinary claim. Such claims aren't immediately accepted as valid theories; they require extraordinary evidence. In the case of human-caused climate change, this kind of evidence is available, but the theory is still not The Truth. It could be wrong. Most climatologists think it's probably right, but none of them is certain. A true scientist is never absolutely certain about anything.