It’s not only white coats and Coke bottle glasses, that’s for sure.  It’s also not a religion.

Science in everyday life seems to have an odd place in religious communities.  Like everything in the world of religion, its inhabitants pick and choose which parts of science they are prepared to acknowledge and which not.  If a religious person is dying of cancer you can be sure they’ll suddenly become very interested in the science of cancer treatment.

If, on the other hand, science steps in to unravel an ancient mystery shrouded in the shadow of religious ignorance then all of a sudden they don’t want to know about it.

Nobody is as ignorant as one who doesn’t want to know.

Because of this false perception of toe-stepping, which is really all that religious types feel towards science in general, science gets a lot of unfair bad press in those communties.  I hope that the rest of this article will help to give a fresh perspective on the reality of science.

When humans evolved the brain as we know it today the world must have been a very strange and scary place indeed.  The everyday environmental entities whose understanding we take for granted today like rushing rivers, fire, wind and thunder just didn’t have anything near an explanation in that age.

With the human brain we’ve come to know and love came the natural inclination to find out why and how things work the way they do.  It rains.  It gets windy.  If you throw a stick up in the air it comes back down to the ground in a consistent way.

The process of observing, testing, and observing again in order to gain an understanding of why and how things are is known as science.

There’s no qualification or minimum requirement for invoking the scientific process.  We’re all natural scientists.

Thanks to the process of observing and being able to solidify conclusions from previous observations we have been able to build a constantly growing knowledge base of scientific facts which has allowed us to become comfortable in our surroundings.  Not only do we understand the world around us but can now also manipulate it to suit us.

Science as a process has an innate humility and innocence which cannot be perverted.  Science has proven, and is a constant reminder, that knowledge is power.  The real beauty of science is that, in principle, any scientific fact can be disassembled into its most basic components and verified by an independant observer.  This means that the scientific process has a built-in reliability mechanism like nothing else.  Without this reliability, the possibility of you being able to read this article in the way you are from where you are sitting would be non-existant.

We can all find a little piece of science somewhere in our lives that we can truly appreciate for how it enables us.

I want to close with a famous quote from Sir Isaac Newton:

“If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.”