Why Science Will Triumph Only When "Theory" Becomes "Law"

A really good book debunking these sort of attacks on the theory of evolution is "The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins, he's an evolutionary biologist and a pretty outspoken atheist with dry British wit that can actually make a book on evolution funny.

And I always go out of my way to recommend funny British books on evolution when I come across them.

I recently read about this very idea. I totally agree. Scientists in general fall victim to these types of attacks precisely because they tend to live in their own walled gardens, never thinking about how others outside of their professions interpret or twist the larger body of scientific knowledge.

But scientists absolutely should care how that knowledge is disseminated and interpreted by lay people.

I've often thought that what is missing from our grade school and high school science caricula is what I would call Science Appreciation. Just like Art Appreciation is taught without the need to pick up a pencil or brush, science appreciation should be taught without the need to fire up a bunson burner or open up a dead frog (which often turns people off of science).

Is should be the duty of all working scientists to be ambassadors of scientific knowledge, to communnicate the joys of scientific wonder and discovery the way astronauts are ambassadors of space exploration.

I'm not a scientist, but I'm a science fan. I love the accumulation of knowledge that I as a lay person living today have accessible to me - knowledge that even Albert Einstein never had access to. The fact that I could tell Albert Einstein things that would blow his miind? That's an amazing thing.

The famous physicist, Richard Fineman, had a term for this appreciation for the wonder of scientific discovery. He called it "the pleasure of finding things out" (see his book of the same title).

That pleasure is what drives most working scientists to enter their fields in the first place, and they should all regard it as their duty to help spread the amazing sense of awe and wonder that comes from this pursuit.

This is a fairly dangerous suggestion. There are reasons for the words used. Take a look at the comments after the article for some interesting insights as to why the those words are used. "Law" and "theory" are completely different terms, and not interchangeable, especially to further a political agenda.

Scientific candor is often used as the ammunition against scientific thought, it is an unfortunate consequence of living in our universe, that scientific knowledge and consensus is bound to shift but unlikely to revolutionize. Many people look to religion to offer the sense of self assured absolute corectness that I do not believe science should be willing to offer. This feeling is quite frankly not compatible with our existence as flawed people who are struggling to know what amounts a very, very small slice of the truth. If we travel down that path not only will adherence to scientific thought be lost when the next shift in consensus about certain details occurs. In fact the shift or discovery itself will be resisted and fought with the zeal of those who used the old way of thinking as a dogma upon which they based a private belief system. The best we can do is teach children that science presents rigorous theroies which are useful and functional in that they closely represent the full truth and can be used to make predictions about the future, these theories are to be discarded when a more useful, functional, predictive and true theory comes along. This active rewriting and re-evaluation of thoughts and positions will never appeal to some, but to do anything else would be to turn science to dogma; a force to which it is diametrically opposed.
I don't oppose the reworking of our vocabulary to more properly convey meaning, and the proposal in this article may be a good Idea but we should be exceedingly careful as to how far we take this, at some point you pass the line from clarification to obfuscation.

Well, I think that might make scientists more credible; they want to be ABSOLUTELY certain.

That's a good thing.

so many 'truths' are dispelled as understanding grows. 'Laws' change, knowledge accumulates.