One of the themes I’ve picked up from re-reading Cosmos is a small feeling for the gradual growth and refinement of our knowledge. We’ve slowly grown in our knowledge and, while quite often what we’ve thought initially is wrong, science is a self correcting process and we’ve slowly gotten nearer to the truth.
The planets are a prime example, originally we were unable to make out any details and had some very odd ideas due to this lack of hard data. People imagined cities and civilisations on both Venus and Mars, later observations even showed what seemed to be a network of canals on Mars. Of course, once we were actually able to visit the planets we found that this wasn’t the case and our knowledge grew massively. Venus is utterly inhospitable, and the Martian canal network was nowhere is sight.
Our methods are not always direct and once it’s explained how we know the things about planets we haven’t even visited, it makes more sense. For example, we know about the composition of an object by the radio frequencies it reflects when examing with a Radio Telescope, as different elements absorb different frequencies.
This, for me, underlines the reason I walked away from religious explanations of the world; Science can not only explain that it knows, but can explain in detail how it knows. Whereas the religious explanation is generally either an argument from authority or circular reasoning. Furthermore, when they are wrong (and they are wrong more often than they will care to admit), they often are incapable of self correcting. One exception to this (and there may well be others especially Taoism) is Buddhism, to quote the Dalai Lama:
“If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.”
Of course, given the Buddha’s teaching on change, it really shouldn’t be a surprising thing that Buddhism can do this.
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