Is science progressive?

Is science progressive?

We live in the Information age, the Computer Age, the Digital Age, and the New Media Age. These are all names describing a time when humans created new technologies using science to advance and facilitate their lives. These advancements have been continuously growing and expanding to a point where going a single day without technology is almost torturous. The fact that there are various names describing one time in human history, emphasizes the grave impact science has had in our lives. Whether this impact is good or bad depends on the interpretation.

Take the movie Her, for example. Her supposedly takes place in 2025, during a time where technology has advanced and grown to the point of basically running people’s lives. The film portrays a man who uses a computer program, who has enough human characteristics and emotions to be a human, to fulfill his emotional needs. A love story emerges between man and computer. Although Her illustrates a society in which science is in fact progressive, it also illustrates the dependency humans have developed for technology over years of ongoing science. If, in this case, progressive were defined as growing and developing, describing the science shown in this movie as progressive would probably be accurate.

However, there is a second definition of “progressive” that should be taken into account. “Progressive” also means modern, liberal, forward thinking, and enlightened. It is not completely erroneous to say that science has improved and facilitated our lives. Electronic or not, it is practically impossible to go a day without science because science is found in everything; from understanding when you’re friend is angry or sad to understanding why it rains. However, to assume that science is “forward-thinking” or “innovative” would be ignoring ones who solely believe in faith. I am sure that a creationist would not describe science as “enlightened.” In fact, part of being a creationist means the rejection of evolution. It seems that as science progresses, those who believe in science find the idea of creationism more and more ridiculous. Although this is just an observation since I have no evidence to support such claim.

Before going any further, an important question to ask is “what is science?” The commonly known definition of science is “the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.” But this is a very general definition, so when new discoveries are made, how can one distinguish whether or not it is true science or pseudoscience. Karl Popper argues that falsifiability should be the demarcation (distinguishing the scientific from the unscientific). When something is falsifiable, it is possible to conceive an observation or an argument, which proves the statement in question to be false. Karl Popper therefore claims that something must be falsifiable for it to be true science and declaring an unfalsifiable theory to be scientifically true is pseudoscience. Although Karl Popper provided one way of distinguishing the science from the non-science, there is no definite way of doing so.

Furthermore, one cannot answer this question until we understand what “scientific progress” is. Normal scientific progress was once viewed as “development-by-accumulation” of accepted facts and theories. However, Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolution argues that evolution of scientific theory does not emerge from the straightforward accumulation of facts, but rather from a set of changing intellectual circumstances and possibilities. Therefore, the discovery of anomalies leads to new paradigms. Kuhn’s theory prevented science to remain stuck within unchangeable, growing paradigms. Again, this goes back to the first definition of “progressive.” Kuhn’s theory still talks about science being growing, but it brings into question whether science cumulate ideas onto ideas rather than shift and question old ideas based on new ones.

Whether or not science is progressive, depends largely on the definition that we give “science”, “progressive”, and “scientific progress.” Like most things, there are many sides to everything and there is rarely one right answer. In this case, before one can even begin to answer the whole question, it is important to look into every little part of the question that makes up the whole because, ironically, we miss the big picture when we directly look at the whole question. Also, if we use the first definition of “progressive” (growing, developing, ongoing), then yes, we can define science as progressive. Science is always growing from different ideas within itself. However, if we use the second definition, describing science as “forward-thinking” and “enlightened” leads to controversial arguments, which brings religion into question. I will probably never be able to answer this question correctly, but I have established something that has brought me one step closer: science is always growing.