SCIENCE

A Concept

AILEEN T. JANSOR

JOMAPLE B. OCENA

Communication 2 – K

11 February 2011
 Nowadays a very impressive medical breakthrough of our time, called stem cell
research, is being talk about not only in many scientists’ laboratories but also in the
church pews and priests’ homilies because of its ethical controversy. But instead of
looking at it from an ethical perspective, we’d like to look at the deeper, underlying issue:
“whether people can come closer in realizing truths about existence from either faith or
science” (Siegel, 2009).

Try to imagine this particular situation. When the members of the family are
literally healthy, they pray to God for guidance and continuous good health. When one of
them got sick, where would they go first? Obviously, they would go to the nearest
hospital for cure, and next to it, the church to which they yearn for quick recovery.

So rather than talk about faith on God, let’s define our faith on science by
discussing the development of its definition.

From past generations, people tried to explain natural events and exerted so much
effort to answer nature’s phenomena. Often times, people would relate problems to myths
or legends, explaining things more on a man’s imagination. This type of belief has its
origin in the religious rites and ceremonies done by primitive people to appease
supernatural beings, believing that there was a connection between natural phenomena
and the “god”. Gradually the religious way of looking the world shifted to scientific view
as learned men devised to treat problems through scientific processes asking questions
and making observations are the very essence of the subject science since then, science
evolves in getting questions and discovering answers.

The advancement of man’s curiosity is supplementary in man’s daily living

showing that human beings observe things around, make guesses, predictions and falling
into a set of foundations for an orderly sequence of processes (Mendoza, Reyes, and Ines,
2003).

In a classical understanding, the word science originated from the Latin word
“scientia” which means knowledge. Science is just a state of “knowing” in a theoretical
knowledge. Fundamentally characterized as a method of obtaining reliable knowledge
about the universe that includes both descriptions of what happens and its explanations
through careful observations and experiments.

On the other hand, science is a vast body of knowledge contributed by people

from different parts of the world, regardless of sex, color, race, religion or political
knowledge. Moreover, it is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world based on
testable hypothesis. It can be characterized as a body of knowledge in which people could
set science similarly to scientific knowledge that usually set the mind of a person in a
physical or biological view.

So rather than giving more definitions for science, let us perhaps discuss one of
the most interesting question related to science: the very question of our Universe’s
existence.

Let’s start with a little scientific information about the Universe itself. According
to Lisle (2005), universe is tremendously large, tremendously old, and full of an
incredible amount of stuff. It is truly vast. However, all of it is finite, including the
amount of information in it. Does that imply that there’s an intelligent force outside of it
that created it?

No. It doesn’t tell us that this isn’t the case, either. But it does tell us something
profound about science; specifically, it tells us something about the theoretical limits of
science. Siegel (2005) gives an analogy, the exploding grenade:

If you watch the individual fragments of a grenade during or even after an

explosion, because you know the laws of physics and how a grenade works, you
can figure out where the grenade exploded, how powerful the explosion was, and
what the grenade was made out of just based on what you see. You can even tell if
you’re extremely careful and understand the physics of grenade explosions really
well, how quickly and in what direction the grenade was moving when it
exploded.
But what you can’t tell, based on looking only after the fact, is how the pin got
pulled, and by whom or what.
So, our assertion is that if we want to know about the Universe, the best source we
have is to look to the Universe itself, and see what it tells us. But if we want to know
what caused the Universe, although there are things we can definitely learn a number of
things about it, our total amount of possible scientific knowledge is limited by the amount
of information available (Stenger, 2004).

When you have no information, science is useless. And at that point, all you have
left is logic and reason, and those are your only weapons against the darkness of
ignorance. Science can get us far, can get us so much further than we’ve ever been
before, but even science has its limits. Respect the religious beliefs of others while
steadfastly standing by the scientific truths that we have discovered to be valid and
factual.
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