Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please - Mark Twain
I find it ironic how the same cortexes that invented science can’t really embrace it. Science describes the world with numbers and metaphysical abstractions, but we originally evolved on spoken stories — and they’ve made more of an impact on us than statistical norms ever could.
Evolution has resulted in brains that crave certainty. It could be argued that science is the basis of certainty, which I can agree with. But what abut the true wonders revealed by the scientific method? Like theories on how species change into new species over time or a quantum-mechanical world where nothing is for sure. I argue these can be worse than counterintuitive, and to a majority of religious Americans, they’re pretty threatening.
It’s not a problem with science itself, but rather the misrepresentation and misapplication of it. Recombination is needed for innovation - I’d say it’s required. We are supposed to be synthesizing already known ideas from various fields and applying them to ours. I believe that this is how we derive inspiration, make progress, and work towards groundbreaking research in science. The whole “standing on shoulders of giants” thing, you know.
But the amount of research I’ve come across which blatantly takes things and repackages them as “novel” makes me rethink what science really means today. The world is getting harder and it seems a lot of people are caught in a hard place where they prioritize any progress over quality progress. But as someone in the space, I understand it.
The products of modern science aren’t good or bad themselves, it’s their use which determines their value. With all the recent advancements, there’s no doubt good science is being done, but a byproduct of this is bad science being done too, more than ever before maybe.
I don’t mean to be pessimistic at all. In the end, I think the only thing that beats science is better science.