Science

Science as a system of belief is no less prone to fallibility than any other but embraces this implicit doubt and uncertainty as a core strength. The procedural aggregation of a body of verifiable, ordered knowledge as scientific truth is the foundation of our Global civilisation.

It is significant to acknowledge that the essential and irreducible doubt and unknowable, effectively metaphysical and unattainable facts and insights that must always lie beyond observation and proof are actually the driving force behind collaborative research and discovery. It is also important to acknowledge that this core incompleteness of all knowledge is as implicit, intimate and irreducible to or in science as it is to reality and any embodied experience of life.

Science is different among systems of belief in that it embraces its own uncertainty as a strength. Notice also that scientists are, as fallible human beings, as likely as anyone to project a certainty and closure upon the world that is first and foremost a reflexive psychological desire for self-control and that does not represent any final truth beyond its own essential self-validating aspirations. The truth, or at least a truth, here is that discovery will never end, that it is of a material as much as logical necessity that knowledge is indefinitely-extensible, and whether this is encountered and experienced as an emotional fear or as an intellectual adventure is the defining property of humanity’s shared future and, inevitably and also, it’s collective failure or success.