"A new scientific truth does not triumph because its opponents are convinced and see the light, but because eventually die, and a new generation in which new concepts are family! "Max Planck," Wissenschaftliche Selbstbiographie ", Leipzig 1948.
is well known in what consists of a big step forward for humanity operated by the science of the modern age: the beliefs have replaced with knowledge. If you are still in the Middle Ages did not want or could distinguish between what you believe and what you knew, if was made, for example, a lot of confusion between the certainties of religion and the intellect, modernity has finally made a little 'order clearly distinguished from each other, placing them on different levels and judging each other as to be illusory and based in reality
The fathers of science like Galileo, Descartes, Locke, unlike the fathers of the church have taught us not longer sufficient simply to believe, but as something more appropriate: whether what is believed to be true. Beliefs based on illusions, prejudices and mistakes must be replaced with the knowledge provided by experience only what is experienced with their senses and checked with its intelligence can be considered true, then good and fruitful. Everything else takes us on a wrong path, so wrong and dangerous. The convictions that were not produced by research of their truth, leave a man staggering in the dark, deprives him of 'intellect and drag him into the hands of a will that does not know and therefore potentially oppressive and violent.
knowledge, to be true, therefore, needs to know to break free from what is not verifiable, established and experience in the real world. What we think we know without evidence is therefore not the fruit of knowledge, but the injury, not ability to judge but thoughtlessness.
Once science has developed tools to replace the illusion of beliefs with the certainty of knowledge, the real sin is to close its eyes to the light of true knowledge, to persevere in error. We all know what it is, at best, foolish and impossible the obscurantist view of reality to let a prisoner of his convictions was not verified. Where there is ignorance and prejudice has good game then the powers that be to impose himself as the only source of knowledge. Galileo's fight against the chief ecclesiastics who denied the truth of the universe to stay in the Copernican Ptolemaic vision, and above all to keep you faithful, is considered by many reasons, the fight against the oppression of power that does not want emancipation man. The simple experience of looking through the telescope would be open to the factual truth of the roundness of the earth by replacing the legends and myths of the Bible.
Modern science and technology tools to process in order to distinguish the true from the false certainty about the laws that have govern nature: no one can tell lies to its own use, the science makes all free to choose the truth and therefore all the same. Knowledge is no longer an instrument of power controlled by a few to maintain and consolidate their dominant position, but all men who can take possession. No one can claim the right to decide the rules of the universe because these are revealed by an instance that transcends the domain of human will: the incontrovertible truth of scientific research. The knowledge as to the power of reality, the discovery of its mechanisms, is in the hands of all those who want to access it, no more than a caste of the chosen few. Thus, only if you use wisely the reason, it is possible to progress not only of knowledge and technique but also of morality.
Critics, however, this overly optimistic view of modern science is not entrusted to those who remain on obscurantist positions. On the contrary, awareness of how a foundation has also illusory and contingent that it contradicts the claim of universality and incontrovertibly, not only is no stranger to scientific research, but that's what you get, or should obtain, from its practice. The science itself is developing tools that give certainty to reach absolute truths, universal and lasting only a scientist who wants to believe it. Precisely the Galilean telescope, along with intoxication of the discovery of the universe can be open to disillusioned knowledge of the limits of science and research. The look on the shape of the cosmos through the telescope reveals, for example, as a sensory experience is closely linked to insecurity and the mutability of the point of view: the big and the small, peripheral and central variables are not immutable, but depend on the perspective and tools available for viewing. Experience disclosed by a broader view of the universe thus provides just a truth contrary to the scientistic illusion: the certainty that it is vain to claim access to definitive knowledge, and complete, or even progressive improvement.
In fact very few human experiences such as the practice of scientific research have the opportunity to test the fragility, the transience and the partiality of all knowledge. The history of science is the history of theories that have emerged gradually more and more imaginative, truth that over time have turned into their opposites because they are produced by partial and limited knowledge. The difference between belief and knowledge, this is the truth that science gives us, is not hierarchical but time is the time, the changing conditions in which they are compared to determine the difference. Their short, is not a constant but changes over time is valid, valid closely linked to conditions in which it is found.
So we can say, paradoxically, it is the science which teaches us to enhance the knowledge basis while uncertain and a particular belief, which leads us to accept it even as a possibility inalienable Search accommodate the know with its limits and its blurring means so much to rely on it, how to recognize bias and the provisional. The word of Popper in his famous discussion Poverty of Historicism is illuminating in this regard: "If we were to rely on the impartiality of scientists, science, even natural science, would be utterly impossible." Science can not but be a human product, therefore subject to human prerogatives, like everything else. If this is so, and could not be otherwise, the only science is possible that the results prove inadequate over time, be revised, even unnecessary and harmful. Every human activity that is intended to ideality think of a context beyond time and space, indifferent to the particular needs and quotas, can only produce disasters.
It must also not overlook the fact that no scientist can be considered free from human weakness. Among these is the tendency to deceive others is not surely the least frequent. Thus, in addition to err in good faith, scientists can easily sacrifice the dominant ideologies and self-interest of the rigorous methods developed by themselves. Not can then be foreign to scientific knowledge, but rather should be an integral part, the criticism of those who directs attention to the manipulative will of his fellow men, although men of science. It is therefore legitimate scientifically suspect that the long process of research knowledge has as much land as illusory and deceptive than the research itself has rejected and continues to reject. The fact that his theories considered heretical in certain conditions and time have proven to be true then, that is relevant and useful to mankind, witnesses and court time as only the true and false. But also - and this is something at least as important - such as denying any legitimacy to beliefs, or not yet verified, is an attitude that would preclude development and progress: we could become close to the truth, we remain slaves to a temporal imaginary, , a path that would have allowed the developments in other directions. Scientific knowledge, by erecting barricades against what he considers unfounded beliefs, cultivating the illusion that his is the only path possible and that there is no alternative. Yet in this case is the same research based on scientific thinking to open up the possibility of imagining various routes and to consider the road taken only as one of those conceivable. If, for example, Euclid the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees and parallel lines never intersect, the very mathematical, more than two thousand years later, conceived the idea that there are other ways to define a space and represent his figures. And even after nearly half a century, a physicist, Albert Einstein, discovered an alternative to the Euclidean model that can be profitably applied to the investigation of the reality of our cosmos.
The real scientific question is thus not being able to distinguish what one knows what one believes, but to emancipate themselves from mental models fossilized so stable that it became futile to resist changing things over time. Rigor to the laws and procedures which they so determine, is most often an irrational approximation in view of the special conditions under which they must be applied, a lack of interest in accommodating the size of the belief that gradually slips to know that the foundations, an underestimation of the psychological weakness of those who, from being intimidated and loss, clinging to certainties misleading.
Willingness to enhance their knowledge in the state of belief also allows players to continually question their own certainties agreed to recognize erroneous. Awareness knowledge of how each covers, more or less hidden, more or less present, even a belief, makes available to accept the limits of the human faculties of discernment. At the same time we do not cling to your certainties for the sole purpose of giving strength to your position but you put it, as it were "experimentally" in the game. In this sense, enhance the prerogatives of a science that agrees to be fully human. In a gesture of humble and strong-willed believe there is much awareness of human limitations, the viability of what they want to grasp the stimulus to overcome them. At the unveiling of the implausibility of a theory or current affairs, in the consciousness of duty fleeting knowledge and belief in certainties, it reveals the peculiarity of man and his condition: the need to continually recreate the tools to become oriented in time and space they inhabit.
