Lately science has been under attack from many sources. It’s hard to be a reality based discipline. Science doesn’t have an agenda (some scientists might, but that’s a different story). Science is the process by which we understand how the world works. If the world works in ways that confuses or confounds us, that’s not because science doesn’t work, its because we are not imaginative enough to understand reality on its own terms. Science just figures out what the world is like on a deep level, it doesn’t necessarily help us come to terms with that revelation. Some people just can’t deal with a fact based reality.
Frankly science is under attack because people have forgotten what its like to live in a world without science. They live in a magical modern world full of such fantastic things that it would make a human from the dark ages pass out in shock. From the most mundane bottle of shampoo, to the most complicated computer we truly inhabit an age deeply infused with science. If you live in America it is an absolute certainty that your life is affected daily by science, and mostly in good ways. Its a good bet you wouldn’t even be reading this if it wasn’t for science. We have become spoiled by living in a world dominated by science, we forget how bad things were before science. So we attack it.
If you have any doubt that our world is dominated in science, try casting a spell. Seriously, get out your spell book, your eye of newt, and go nuts. Perhaps you want to make lead into gold, or maybe turn something invisible, or perhaps you want to do something less concrete like make someone happy, or sad. (incidentally all things science may have already accomplished) I would willing to wager a guess that you wont have much success. Even if you did by some fluke manage to make your spell work, chances are you wont be able to reliably repeat the same process and get the same results over and over again. Your non-science magic is weak sauce.
You know what we call stuff that you can do over and over again and always get the same result? We call that science. It’s like magic that works every time. The amazing thing about science magic is that you don’t need to be a conjurer to make it work. If your science is good anyone should be able to repeat what you did and make it work. In fact this is one of the important parts of science, others have to be able to cast the same science spell you did and get the same results.
Think about it from a historic point of view. We used to have a whole host of competing views for how the world around us worked. Some thought spirits and demons controlled the workings of everything. These spirits would sometimes get angry and cause floods, or heat waves, often they needed blood sacrifices to make them happy again. Some people simplified this system and said just one spirit (god) was in charge of the whole shebang, but god still got angry sometimes and still needed sacrifice (confusingly his own son at one point).
This is more or less how it was for a very long time. People waged wars over who’s big spirit was the best, people killed women for being “witches,” sacrificed people and animals to appease the gods, bleed demons out of people, killed each other over the “evil eye”, oppressed each other because the big spirit said it was OK,etc. The situation was pretty grim.
Then in a couple areas around the globe (ancient Greece and China, and a couple others) people started to slowly stumble upon science. First they mixed science with mysticism. This produced things like alchemy, astrology, numerology, and the like. These new disciplines were a great revelation because while the magic didn’t always work, tantalizingly sometimes it did!
Astrologers could in fact predict certain things about the natural world with a high degree of accuracy. So much so that they became an important part of life at the time. They still got a lot of things wrong, but it must have been amazing to realize that you had stumbled upon some magic spells that actually worked every single time you cast them. The alchemists and numerologists had similar luck with some of their “spells.”
I can imagine how rewarding it must have been for the early science/mystics to mix a couple of carefully prepared chemicals together and get a great blast of fizz or a loud pop. Their magic was working! Or to be an early astrologist and realize that you could tell with great accuracy exactly when the moon would be full, or when Venus would be in a certain location in the sky. You had stumbled upon a deep secret of the world, and it was yours to control…magic!
These people for the most part closely guarded these magic secrets. If you told everyone that you produced the fizz by mixing vinegar with baking soda, or that you simply did some math to know when Venus would be back it would allow any commoner to “steal your magic.” So while these early science/mystics were slowly stumbling onto science, progress was slow. They didn’t share, and they certainly didn’t peer review. The whole works were still deeply wrapped up with spirits, demons and the like.
What was happening though was that a systematic framework was being built for this new magic of science. You could get science spells to work, but you had to always do them the same way, you had to be precise, and you had to follow the rules. More and more people realized that the rules were not different for each sect, or religion, or cult, but the same or everyone. The rules didn’t depend on which god you worshiped. Humanity was slowly stumbling onto the fact that nature wasn’t random, and that we could figure things out about how it worked, and that these facts seemed to be universal, and most importantly not connected to a supernatural world.
The new magic of science was slowly pushing the mystics out of its ranks. The mystics magic just wasn’t as strong as the science magic. Science worked too often and too well to bother with the trappings of spirits and demons.
This progress however began to scare a lot of people. People whose power depended on a lot of people being afraid of a big spirit. If science pushed too hard these people might be out of a job, so they pushed back. “The sun goes around the earth!” “The earth is flat!” “Illness is caused by bad humors!” being but a few famous examples. Again the politics of spirits and demons held science back, but science was much too powerful magic, and progress continued.
Science began to bring widespread benefits to humanity. The magic of sanitation, and the germ theory, the calculus, physics, biology, theory of gravity, theory of evolution, all of these started to have real effects on peoples lives. As more scientists did more science the magic of science got stronger and the “spells” became more and more useful to humanity.
Planes, computers, heart transplants, space exploration, crop hybrids, these science spells not only worked, they made people happy, and their lives better. Of course science also makes bombs that work much better than any incantation ever did at destroying your enemy, but for the most part science has brought us peaceful advancement rather than destruction. Over time science became the only game in town. People no longer look at tea leaves to see how volcanoes work, or toss bones into a cup to figure out what causes cancer, we all turn to science for these answers now.
Science magic won because science magic is…real. We don’t call it magic anymore because we think that it’s silly to use terms like magic and science together. But it is magical to discover how nature works, to figure out how to use that fact to make human life better, to create something new that works.
Even though we use science for literally everything these days, even though it has made our lives possible, science is still under attack. For much the same reasons that it has always been under attack. Religions and cults and spirits and demons still haunt the minds of many, and they get angry when science goes against their “revealed” knowledge. These attacks manifest most strongly where the teachings of a certain spirits contradict science. So you have debates over things like evolution because it goes against certain parts of many holy books, but you don’t see many people fighting over gravity or lasers as these were not featured heavily in the holy books of the time. I guess we can be thankful that early holy book writers didn’t add in a passage railing against coherent light or silicon semi-conductors.
There are however new attacks. Companies that got rich using science are now fighting to keep science from informing people about the consequences of those activities. Oil companies use science every day when they hunt for and extract oil from the ground, but they don’t want us to use science to see what will happen if we burn all that oil and put that co2 into the air. They are in essence asking us to cherry pick the parts of science we want to accept. “Use chemistry and physics when it helps you find oil, but not when it tells you that global warming is a danger to humanity.” Science doesn’t work that way, you either take it all, or give it all up.
Science magic has been stronger than any challenger it has yet faced. It has emerged as the best way we have of understanding the world. It provides the most insight into how things work, and how they will affect us. In fact it is the only reliable way we have of understanding the world. That doesn’t mean that it is perfect, but its the best magic we got. I suggest we continue to support and improve science, and continue to defend it from these most recent threats.