The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [17]
Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? There isn’t a religion on the planet that doesn’t long for a comparable ability - precise, and repeatedly demonstrated before committed sceptics - to foretell future events. No other human institution comes close.
Is this worshipping at the altar of science? Is this replacing one faith by another, equally arbitrary? In my view, not at all. The directly observed success of science is the reason I advocate its use. If something else worked better, I would advocate the something else. Does science insulate itself from philosophical criticism? Does it define itself as having a monopoly on the ‘truth’? Think again of that eclipse a thousand years in the future. Compare as many doctrines as you can think of, note what predictions they make of the future, which ones are vague, which ones are precise, and which doctrines - every one of them subject to human fallibility - have error-correcting mechanisms built in. Take account of the fact that not one of them is perfect. Then simply pick the one that in a fair comparison works best (as opposed to feels) best. If different doctrines are superior in quite separate and independent fields, we are of course free to choose several - but not if they contradict one another. Far from being idolatry, this is the means by which we can distinguish the false idols from the real thing.
Again, the reason science works so well is partly that built-in error-correcting machinery. There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths. That openness to new ideas, combined with the most rigorous, sceptical scrutiny of all ideas, sifts the wheat from the chaff. It makes no difference how smart, august or beloved you are. You must prove your case in the face of determined, expert criticism. Diversity and debate are valued. Opinions are encouraged to contend - substantively and in depth.
The process of science may sound messy and disorderly. In a way, it is. If you examine science in its everyday aspect, of course you find that scientists run the gamut of human emotion, personality and character. But there’s one facet that is really striking to the outsider, and that is the gauntlet of criticism considered acceptable or even desirable. There is much warm and inspired encouragement of apprentice scientists by their mentors. But the poor graduate student at his or her PhD oral exam is subjected to a withering crossfire of questions from the very professors who have the candidate’s future in their grasp. Naturally the students are nervous; who wouldn’t be? True, they’ve prepared for it for years. But they understand that at this critical moment, they have to be able to answer searching questions posed by experts. So in preparing to defend their theses, they must practise a very useful habit of thought: they must anticipate questions. They have to ask: where in my dissertation is there a weakness that someone else might find? I’d better identify it before they do.
You sit in at contentious scientific meetings. You find university colloquia in which the speaker has hardly gotten thirty seconds into the talk before there are devastating questions and comments from the audience. You examine the conventions in which a written report is submitted to a scientific journal for possible publication, then is conveyed by the editor to anonymous referees whose job it is to ask: did the author do anything stupid? Is there anything in here that is sufficiently interesting to