Science never gives up searching for truth, since it never claims to have achieved it. It is civilizing because it puts truth ahead of all else, including personal interests. These are grand claims, but so is the enterprise in which scientists share. How do we encourage the civilizing effects of science? First, we have to understand science.
Scientia is knowledge. It is only in the popular mind that it is equated with facts. That is of course flattering, since facts are incontrovertible. But it is also demeaning, since facts are meaningless. They contain no narrative.
Science, by contrast, is story-telling. This is evident in the way we use our primary scientific instrument, the eye. The eye searches for shapes. It searches for a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Plato was a great story teller.
Chaitin is a great story teller as is Wolfram and Hawking and Vafa and Penrose and Wesson and so on.
Darwin was a great story teller, too.
C.S. Lewis was a great story teller.
Rightwhale - who is a physicist - is fixing to tell us a story – and I expect it to be particularly engaging.
hosepipe and MHGinTN also have a story to tell.
The stories betty boop and I have to tell - like Voegelin’s and Pannenburg’s and Pattee’s - do not have any artificial boundaries such as “methodological naturalism” which some story tellers treat as if an ancient map: “here there be dragons.”
Moreover our primary instrument is not the physical eye.
Then again, it was not the physical eye to Martyr, Einstein, Reimann, Plato, etc. either...
Moreover our primary instrument is not the physical eye.
***My primary instrument is still the physical eye. Here’s an example:
Romans 16:23
...
Erastus, who is the city’s director of public works, and our brother Quartus send you their greetings.
There is an archaeological find where an inscription says:
“Erastus, commissioner of public works [aedile], laid this pavement at his own expense.”
http://www.facingthechallenge.org/erastus.php
One can go and physically touch that piece of evidence and examine it with his own eye. The same is true of dozens of other pieces of new testament evidence. The historicity behind the documents in the new testament is very solid. When they say things that are non-controversial, they get the facts right. That’s an indicator that the documents are historically accurate.
When even enemies acknowledge the facts, that’s when you know you’re on solid ground. Jesus’s enemies, friends, indifferent souls, all agree that Jesus was put to death for blasphemy before the Sanhedrin, claiming equality with God. No miracle here, just pure history.
I have come to a rational conclusion that Jesus was telling the truth when he was under oath. Antichristian bigots often try to paint our viewpoint as irrational, but that doesn’t jibe with the facts that even the enemies at the time admit.
I have seen unbelievers deny the historicity of Julius Caesar, Christopher Columbus, John Adams being 2nd president of the U.S. and several other historically accepted personages, all in their quest to deny Christ. Now, THAT’s irrational.
We need more birds and fewer frogs ... don’tchaknow!
What a magnificent essay/post, my dearest sister in Christ!
It is mainly through story telling that humans acquire knowledge, historically speaking. We call this the transmission of culture....
But there are stories; and then there are stories. The best, most reliable story is what Plato called alethines logos -- the "likely story." Human experience plus accumulated special (as in species and cultural) knowledge is the cutting edge between the likely and the unlikely story.... Man must judge, as he himself is to be judged in the endtime.
Such a beautiful post, my dearest sister in Christ! Thank you ever so much!