INTFILO A53

Lim, Via Marie E.

03/03/16
ID Number 11535504

Date of Submission:
Submitted to: Mr. Lualhati

Q2: Does Science give us the truth?

Science is not about objective universal truths. My point is that Science

describes the world but does not explain it. But to describe the world is to
explain it, and everything beyond what can be quantified and analyzed is a
purely subjective value judgment. When you ask whether or not science can
provide ultimate truths, you are asking the wrong questions.
Instead, the purpose of science is to seek out and answer those
questions about the world that do have verifiable and objective answers. So
if something exists that is "beyond science", then it is outside of the realm of
objective and verifiable truth: when we know something with any level of
certainty, then it is because we've done some kind of science on it.
And that's the important point. Science isn't just a body of facts and to
do science isn't just to use scientific instruments in a lab, science is any
method of testing a conjecture against observations in the physical world to
gauge its validity and to do science is to conduct such a test.
Notice a particular choice of language here. I don't say that we do
science to determine whether or not something is "true". The gravest
misunderstanding is the assumption that science is about truth. Rather, it's
about established validity. For instance, if you were to ask whether or not
classical mechanics were "truthful", I wouldn't say yes because it's long since
been established that Newtonian physics breaks down at the atomic and
cosmological scales. However, I also would not say no because classical
physics, despite not being totally and perfectly true, is still extremely useful
for understanding many things about the world.
That there is, in some ways, a sort of zeal around many people who are
interested in science popularly but not in a professional manner I think has
less to do with science and more to do with the fact that science is inevitably
involved in a number of important political issues, or at least that arguing
from verifiable information forms the basis of reasoned debate. A number of

really heavy questions now have a very major scientific component if they
aren't entirely scientific already.