Nienaturalna natura nauki

Indeed, many people accept the ideas of science because they have been told that these ideas are true rather than because they understand them.

Even though most, if not all, of Aristotle's science was wrong - he can be thought of as the scientist of common sense - he established the basis of a system for explaining the world based on postulates and logical deduction. This was brilliantly exploited by Euclid and Archimedes. By contrast the Chinese, often thought of as scientists, were expert engineers but made negligible contributions to science. Their philosophies were essentially mystical, and it may have been rationality and a concept of laws governing nature that allowed science to develop in the West.

Firstly, the world just is not constructed on a common-sensical basis. This means that 'natural' thinking - ordinary, day-to-day common sense - will never give an understanding about the nature of science. Scientific ideas are, with rare exceptions, counter-intuitive: they cannot be acquired by simple inspection of phenomena and are often outside everyday experience. Secondly, doing science requires a conscious awareness of the pitfalls of 'natural' thinking. For common sense is prone to error when applied to problems requiring rigorous and quantitative thinking; lay theories are highly unreliable.

Science can be quite uncomfortable to live with - at least for some people. It offers no hope for an afterlife, it tolerates no magic and it doesn't tell us how to live.

Physics is probably a good way of showing what is meant by science: it tries to provide an explanation of nature - the world we live in - at the most fundamental level. It aims to find explanations for an enormous variety of phenomena - the movement of all objects; the nature of light and sound, heat and electricity; the fundamental constitution of matter - in terms of as few principles as possible. Rigorous theories are constructed which explain observed phenomena, and these theories must be capable of being tested by both confirmation and attempts to falsify them. It is also an absolute requirement that theories must be capable of modification, or even abandonment, when evidence demands it. In this process, all the phenomena must be capable of observation by independent observers, for scientific knowledge is public knowledge.

The physics of motion provides one of the clearest examples of the counter-intuitive and unexpected nature of science.

In very general terms, children learn by direct experience, authority, intuition and logic. All of these lead to a common-sense view of the world, but not to a scientific one.

Unlike science, everyday common-sense thinking is characterized by its naturalness. It involves complex mental processes of which we are usually quite unaware but which allow us to deal with the requirements of daily life. For most of everyday life it works extremely well, but for science it is quite unsatisfactory. It is quite different from scientific thinking, lacking the necessary rigour, consistency and objectivity. Most people regard their ideas about the world as being true without being aware of the grounds for a particular belief. This is quite unlike the self-aware and self-critical methodology of science. Common-sense thinking is also prone to lead to error, particularly when formal problems are posed and when the information available is limited. Indeed, common-sense thinking is not concerned with tackling formal problems or generating general solutions. The differences between common-sense thinking and scientific thinking can be illuminated in two ways: first by looking at the way in which children develop their thinking and then by looking at some aspects of adult thinking.

Piaget has characterized two aspects of children's theory of the world: animism, the tendency to regard objects as living and endowed with will, and artificialism, the idea that everything is made by someone for a special purpose. When a six-year-old is asked what the sun is made of, the reply is 'Of fire.' But how? 'Because there is fire up there.' But where did the fire come from? 'From the sky.' How was the fire made in the sky? 'It was lighted with a match .. .' There is a spontaneous tendency towards animism, for the child to believe as if nature were charged with purpose and as if chance did not exist. When a child says the sun follows us, the child attributes purposiveness to the sun. But when asked 'What is a fork?', the reply is 'It is for eating with' - an artificialist response.

Studies have shown that a number of key reasoning processes need to be learned before children can grasp the basic nature of the physical world. These include the idea of variables in thinking about causal events, together with the necessity of changing the variables one at a time if a proper comparison of their effects is to be made (in thinking about a simple case of equilibrium, such as in balancing a beam, for example, there are four variables - two weights and two distances from the point of support); the idea of probability and correlation; and the whole idea of abstract models to explain, for example, the solar system or the weather . None of these ideas is really natural, and when children have learned these ideas their success in science tests improves dramatically.

people - including scientists - have for trying to confirm hypotheses, rather than for trying to refute them.

Correct probability judgements are often counter-intuitive. Striking coincidences often lead to ideas of supernatural forces at play.

We tend to generalize from our own experience, and so there is a tendency to believe illusory correlations ranging from 'fat people are jolly' to 'if you wash your car it will rain soon afterwards' and all sorts of theories about illness. Even psychologists have been known to find correlations between projective tests when none were later shown to exist. However, simple associations are probably very useful in everyday life. There is in general a preference for simple rather than complex explanations.

The very natures of scientific and technological thinking are dissimilar. Many aspects of technology are visual and non-verbal, which is quite unlike scientific thinking. It is not that scientists do not visualize structures, concepts and mechanisms, but exposition is fundamental to science and the images must be translated into language and symbols, particularly mathematics. Unencumbered by verbalized theories, the designers of technology bring together, in their minds, different elements in new combinations. In contrast to science, technological knowledge from the Renaissance until the nineteenth century was carried in books which were dominated by illustrations - the information was largely carried in pictorial form. Many of the books carried numerous illustrations of mechanical linkages, assemblies of gears and cams, and machines themselves, such as pumps. Curiously, there were claims that all these mechanical arts rested on the firm foundation of mathematics, but quite the contrary was true: there is no evidence for the use of either geometry or arithmetic in the design of the machines. It seems that it was true even then, as now, that claims that designs were based on science gave them greater respectability. Visual thinking also dominated industrial design. Science offered no guidance to the early designers of motorcycles, for example - it could not teU them where to put the engine, battery and fuel tank in relation to one another.

Just before Marconi's invention, the English scientist Karl Pearson had, in 1892, written in his book The Logic of Science that he regarded electromagnetic waves as having no useful application.

Aristotle also clearly recognized one of the key features of early science: it offered no reward other than intellectual gratification. 'Thus, since men turned to philosophy in order to escape from a state of ignorance, their aim was evidently knowledge, rather than any sort of practical gain. The evidence of history confirms this: for, when the necessities of life were mostly provided, men turned their minds to this study as a leisure-time reaction.'

A case can be made for the importance of Christianity in fostering, in the West, the rationality, in the sense of logical arguments and reasoned discussion, that was necessary for science, and in also providing a system in which there was the possibility - even the conviction - that there were laws controlling nature. Such a conviction was unique to Christianity.

It is true that the Chinese did not possess geometry, but perhaps their philosophy and the absence of capitalism were also important.

The development of Western science has been based on two great achievements, the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility of finding out causal relationships by systematic experiment (at the Renaissance). In my opinion one need not be astonished that the Chinese sages did not make these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.

The view presented here is that only those societies influenced by the Greeks developed science.

While emphasizing the contribution of Christian society to science, the contributions of Islam must also be recognized. Islamic scholars also continued the Greek tradition, and it may not be irrelevant that Islam offers a unifying perspective of knowledge and considers the pursuit of knowledge to be a virtue. It could, of course, not have been Christianity alone that was responsible for the flowering of science in the West in the sixteenth century.

There was no inevitability that science should have arisen in Greece, or that it should have been sustained by the intellectual climate of Christianity and capitalism.

A widely held view is that creativity in science is based on what is known as evolutionary epistemology or the chancepermutation model. In essence, this model suggests that scientists randomly generate theories, of which the good ones survive since they are selected because of their explanatory powers.

By contrast, the revolutionary scientists, like Darwin and Einstein, change the paradigm. It has been asked why, if revolutionaries are accorded so much acclaim, everyone does not opt for that mode of science. An answer may be provided by the state of the science - whether, for example, the conditions are right for revolution - but a more likely answer is because it is very, very hard to think of revolutionary ideas.

As the mathematician David Hilbert once expressed it, the importance of a scientific work can be measured by the number of previous publications it makes it superfluous to read.

Direct evidence for competition in science comes from the finding that 60 per cent of scientists in a survey reported that at least once in their careers some other scientist had preceded them in the publication of their findings.

'A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents generally die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.'

more recently, the revolution in molecular biology changed the paradigm from metabolism to information.

Kuhn has further claimed that paradigm-changes come about through revolutions in science which result from the increasing number of strains put upon the existing paradigm. These strains arise because of the difficulties that are being experienced with the ideas constrained by the current paradigm. Since rival paradigms are regarded by Kuhn as being incommensurable, and so cannot be compared, there is thus no rational basis for the change from one to another: rather, one has to explain the revolutions in terms of the social structure of the scientific community. That is, there is a social process by which the community is persuaded to adopt the new paradigm, since, as we have seen, scientists do not like to give up their hard-won ideas. One may recall Planck's remark that some scientists never do this and the new ideas become established because their opponents die. This may be rather a cynical view. Is it not much more likely that the community will adopt the new view - however painful, like Wegener's ideas about continental drift - when new evidence shows that the new theory provides a more satisfactory explanation? Nevertheless, Kuhn is correct in emphasizing the importance of social process in biology, but in acknowledging this we approach the abyss of relativism.

Merton has described what he calls the Matthew Effect - scientists who are already eminent get a disproportionate amount of credit, at the expense of those less well known.

Such a failure is undoubtedly culturally determined, the culture being one that adopts a scientific approach.

Blondlot was even challenged by some physicists who claimed that they had been the first to discover N-rays. The number of papers published in the leading French journal on N -rays reached a peak in 1904, but then R. W. Wood, an American physicist, visited Blondlot's laboratory and published a report in Nature. Wood was persuaded that N-rays did not exist. Not only did all his tests with Blondlot's apparatus fail, but he reported that the results were unaffected when he somewhat mischievously removed a key element of the apparatus.

Unlike science, religion is based on unquestioning certainties. It is neither easy nor natural for most people to live with uncertainty, and religion can provide a solution to many problems, particularly moral ones. Thus all religious belief can be regarded as natural - in the sense that most societies, both present and past, have had religious beliefs that can provide an explanation of its members' origins and make some meaning of their lives. This presents a problem for scientists who have to reconcile their views with religion or reject it, since, as I will try to show, religion and science are incompatible. There is also another basic problem, for, as Tolstoy pointed out, 'Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: "What shall we do and how shall we be?" , Tolstoy was right in that science cannot provide moral guidance.

Murray Gell-Mann, one of the founders of modern physics, says: "All of modern physics is governed by that magnificent and thoroughly confusing discipline called quantum mechanics invented more than fifty years ago. It has survived all tests. We suppose that it is exacdy correct. Nobody understands it but we all know to. use it and how to apply it to all problems: and so we have learned to live with the fact nobody can understand it".

The tradition of Averroes was taken to its logical conclusion by David Hume, who put it succinctly: 'Our most holy religion is founded on Faith, not on reason.' Opposing the traditional doctrine that science and religion were complementary, Hume maintained that they were mutually exclusive.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

St Anselm: faith seeking understanding.

our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes.

the better the understanding we have of the world, the better the chance we have to make a just society.

science does not tell us how to live: that it has nothing to contribute on moral issues. It is the politicians, lawyers, philosophers and finally all citizens who have to decide what sort of society we will live in.