4 - Modern Science and Contemporary Discomfort: Metaphor and Reality

Summary

Has modern science made our universe “an unbounded theater of the absurd,” or is this anxiety misplaced? What do we mean by “the scientific method,” and how does it differ from other methods of understanding our world? Is science a description of reality? Is it metapor or truth? Who decides what science is, and what is to be taught in class rooms?

This essay is based on an essay originally written for The Rights of Memory: Essays on History, Science and American Culture, edited by Taylor Littleton, and published by University of Alabama Press in 1986. It is based on a lecture given at Auburn University.

1

Robert Penn Warren has spoken on “the use of the past.” One such is surely to situate the present. If for science the present seems unfriendly we might, for comfort, recall the inscription on the dome of the great hall of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington:

TO SCIENCE PILOT OF INDUSTRY MULTIPLIER OF THE HARVEST EXPLORER OF THE UNIVERSE REVEALER OF NATURE'S LAWS ETERNAL GUIDE TO TRUTH

The nineteenth-century optimist who wrote these words is, alas, no longer with us. Instead we have the professional demonstrator, the fundamentalist preacher, and the moralist legislator. Perhaps it is too much to say that we have fallen on the winter of our discontent.

But there are cold winds that blow from Washington, and the chill of indifference, even hostility, from the country as a whole, makes it somewhat unlikely that these words would be written today.