SCIENCE

SCIENCE
Nowadays a very impressive medical breakthrough of our time, called stem cell research, is being talked
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 healthy, they pray to God
for guidance and continuous good health. When one of them got sick, where would they go first? They
would go to the nearest hospital for a cure, and next to it, the church to which they yearn for quick
recovery.
So rather than talk about faith in God, let’s define our faith in 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, 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 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 a testable hypothesis. It can be characterized as a body of
knowledge in which people could set science similarly to scientific knowledge that usually sets 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
questions 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), the
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 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, we assert 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 learn several 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.

SCIENCE

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