Print What is Science?
Written by Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith, 2011
What is science? Coming from the Latin word scientia, meaning ‘knowledge’, science is humanity’s vehicle for the pursuit of knowledge—with the ultimate knowledge we needed being self-knowledge: the reconciling, redeeming and thus rehabilitating understanding of our less-than-ideally-behaved, seemingly-imperfect HUMAN CONDITION!
Why, when the ideals are so clearly to be cooperative, loving and selfless are we humans competitive, aggressive and selfish—in fact, SO ruthlessly competitive, brutal and even murderous that human life has become all but unbearable and we have nearly destroyed our own planet?! The famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung was forever saying, ‘wholeness for humans depends on the ability to own their own shadow’ because he recognised that ONLY finding understanding of our dark side could end our underlying insecurity about our fundamental goodness and worth as humans and, in so doing, make us ‘whole’. The pre-eminent philosopher Sir Laurens van der Post was making the same point as Jung when he said, ‘True love is love of the difficult and unlovable’1 and ‘Only by understanding how we were all a part of the same contemporary pattern [of wars, cruelty, greed and indifference] could we defeat those dark forces with a true understanding of their nature and origin.’2
Yes, the REAL frontier for the human race—and most particularly for its designated vehicle for enquiry, science—was never outer space but inner space, the search for this makes-us-‘whole’, psychologically-rehabilitating, human-race-transforming-and-thus-human-race-saving UNDERSTANDING OF THE HUMAN CONDITION! In terms of the question ‘what is science?’, the truth is solving the human condition was science’s all-important objective. In 1982 the author Marilyn Ferguson wrote these words about humanity’s dreamed-of liberation from the human condition: ‘Maybe [the scientist-philosopher] Teilhard de Chardin was right; maybe we are moving toward an omega point [a final unification of our split selves]—Maybe we can finally resolve the planet’s inner conflict between its neurotic self and its real self. Our real self knows how to commune, how to create…From everything I’ve seen people really urgently want the kind of new beginning…[that I am] talking about [where humans will live in] cooperation instead of competition.’3
The immense frustration and danger for humankind is that these words were written 30 years ago and yet the ‘urgently’ needed ‘resol[ution]’ of the ‘inner conflict’ of our human condition still hadn’t arrived—which is in truth the deeper reason for the public’s great disillusionment with science today. It is no wonder a 2011 Australian Academy of Science report found a ‘staggering’ decline in the number of Australian year 11 and 12 (senior-equivalent) students studying the different branches of science, from 94 percent 20 years ago to just 51 percent today4.
Yes, the fundamental reason people are asking ‘what is science?’ is because they want to know ‘what’s wrong with science’—what is science if it can’t fulfil its principal task of finding the reconciling understanding of the human condition?!
MOST WONDERFULLY, just when we had become exasperated with science, it is now finally able to provide the dreamed-of, exonerating, ‘good-and-evil’-reconciling, ‘burden-of-guilt’-lifting and thus rehabilitating, ‘inner conflict’-‘resolv[ing]’, human-race-transforming EXPLANATION OF THE HUMAN CONDITION! So to the question ‘what is science?’, we can say that it is the saviour of the human race, as it was always intended to be.
However, before presenting this fabulous, human-race-liberating, ultimate scientific breakthrough explanation of the human condition, the issue of the human condition itself, and how science has been coping with it, needs to be explained.
The truth is, the issue of the human condition has been such a terrifying subject we humans have hardly been able to acknowledge it existed, let alone admit it was the subject that science had to solve if there was to be a future for the human race.
So, what is the human condition? It is the agonising, underlying, core, real question in all of human life, of are humans good or are we possibly the terrible mistake that all the evidence seems to unequivocally indicate we might be? While it’s undeniable that we humans are capable of great love, we also have an unspeakable history of brutality, rape, torture, murder and war. Despite all our marvellous accomplishments, we humans have, in fact, been the most ferocious and destructive force the world has ever known—and the eternal question has been ‘why?’