Omniscience: a rant.

 In some ways you have to blame the scientists.

We use the scientific method, they say, and that's the best and only certain way to discover the truth about the universe.

Now, in a way that's true (assuming there is such a thing as truth). But the statement above is still wrong.

It comes in the first two words: we use.

Scientific method takes you from a point of understanding A to a point of understanding B, and proves it by both logic and experiment. 

There's nothing wrong with that. You don't even have to be able to fit Point A onto other stuff you know. That doesn't necessarily make the science wrong, or not useful.

On the other hand, if you ask a scientist what will happen when you're dealing with an entirely new event - ooh, let's take as an example an outbreak of a new virus - then he or she will naturally not be sure of the way from any Point A to Point B, and so what he or she does isn't going to be science.

It'll just be the best-informed guess anyone can make, based on stuff that is science. In that case we aren't following science; we're following scientists.

And if everyone just recognised that, then perhaps we'd could all stop shouting at each other and get together to work out our best bet for survival.

Word To Contemplate Today: omniscience. Omni- means all or everywhere, from the Latin omnis, all. -science comes from the Latin scīre, to know.