A modified excerpt from the book 'Climate - A New Story'Except among the religious fringe, science is a primary locus of authority in our society: for at least a century to be "scientific" has been among the highest sources of legitimacy in business, government, medicine, and many other fields. Even those who consciously reject some of science's teachings aspire to it. As our culture sees science as its foremost means to discover truth, to reject what science says seems the epitome of irrationality, tantamount to a willful denial of truth itself.
Science provides our culture's main map of reality.To modern society, science is more than a system of knowledge production or a method of inquiry. So deeply embedded it is in our understanding of what is real and how the world works, that we might call it the religion of our civilization.
The reader might protest, "Science is not a religion. It is the opposite of a religion, because it doesn't ask us to take anything on faith. The Scientific Method provides a way to sift fact from falsehood, truth from superstition."
In fact, the Scientific Method, like most religious formulae for the attainment of truth,
rests on a priori metaphysical assumptions that we must indeed accept on faith. First among them is objectivity, which assumes among other things that the formulation and testing of hypotheses don't alter the reality in which the experiments take place. This is a huge assumption that is by no means accepted as obvious by other systems of thought. Other metaphysical assumptions include:
- That anything real can in principle be measured and quantified
- That everything that happens does so because it is caused to happen (in the sense of Aristotelian efficient cause)
- That the basic building blocks of matter are generic -- for instance, that any two electrons are identical
- That nature can be described by invariant mathematical laws
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