Thinking scientifically may be the right way to get to the truth for the person who is scientifically oriented such as any of the scientists working in scientific disciplines, but not all people can get to the truth scientifically. There may be many different ways to get to the truth.
Truth a lot of times depends on people’s perception – what they may see as real and truthful. There may be concrete truths and abstract truths.
A real scientist will get to the truth through research and scientific experiment. This truth derived by the scientist will be a scientific truth. But a lay person may get to the truth in different ways and make value judgements at the same time about what is the truth and what is not the truth. The scientist may also make value judgements when conducting his experiments in research to get to the truth.
The scientist will develop a research design consisting of the hypothesis and the null hypothesis. Once all research is done and an analysis is performed the truth will either be the hypothesis or the null hypothesis. But scientists do not depend on one research design to get to the truth. There may be more than one scientist or groups of scientists working on a similar problem. If they all come up with the same hypothesis or null hypothesis, then scientists will say that what they have discovered is the truth.
But many times the truth as determined by the scientific method will be disproved and a new truth will emerge.
Thinking scientifically may be a little different than using the scientific method to come to a scientific conclusion or hypothesis. How does one think scientifically? Without being a scientist or person of scientific background a person may not think scientifically but may think spiritually to come to the truth which is why scientifically oriented people say there is evolution and spiritually-minded people say there is creation.
There are those who think both scientifically and spiritually and come to different truths than the science-oriented person or the spiritual-oriented person.
Getting to the truth for the spiritually oriented person is easy in some respects, but in others the truth may never be found. According to Christian/Judaic principles, God or Jesus is the truth. That should be easy. “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” (John 14: 6, Holy Bible). We can find the truth by believing in God.
But for those who do not believe there is a God, the truth is something they must find out and some try the scientific way. But science never has an absolute answer. In science the answer is always a hypothesis. The truth for science is that the hypothesis has been proved. But along the way, someone may come along and disprove that hypothesis and we have a new truth.
Everyday life presents us with the truth in every minute. We have two legs, two arms, and the grass is green when it is green and brown when it is dried up. The trees have leaves in the summer and none in the winter. These are easy truths.
But how did the tree first get there? And how do leaves photosynthesize? These truths we learn through scientific research and discovery. But who invented the tree in the first place? Can we get to that truth through scientific discovery?
We should not tell a lie. We must tell the truth. The truth is reality or what is real. It can not be something made up.The truth must be proved in the courts of law. Yet with good lawyers, oftentimes false truths are proved in order to give justice to the accused. The scientific method is used in law, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and other disciplines.
But there are also those who say that reality is based on the perception of an individual and each person has his own perception or reality. Some people even say there is no reality. Some people think the way they remember something is the truth. Memories can be illusive for some and not reveal factual truth. There are those people however who do remember intricate details of the factual truth – they remember the facts, such as witnesses on the witness stand must relate the facts and if they lie and do not tell the truth they are guilty of perjury. In this case we have a legal truth – the facts as stated by the witness, but the lawyer will try to upset the facts and he may even uncover that the facts are not true facts, but lies told by the witness. In this case the lawyer tries to arrive at the truth scientifically.
There are those who will always seek the truth and never find it. What is the truth of the universe? Did it start out as the Big Bang or did the God, the greatest scientist of all, invent it in his lab one day? With his mathematical charts exclusive to no other than himself he decided to make a Big Bang. Maybe he did a lot of experimentation first and then finally conceived of the Big Bang idea. It worked and he created the universe. Then he began to experiment with making organisms and giving them genes, DNA, Chromosomes, and a unique system whereby the cells communicated with each other and the brain. And he devised organs that had truly remarkable functions using hormones, enzymes, etc to regulate such things as digestion, blood flow etc. He probably worked at this a long time and came up with a system for every living animal. But how did he make these different species? How did he separate one species from another?
He probably came up with a few mistakes like the Neanderthal.( Perhaps there are still a few leftover Neanderthals. They lurk in offices and under desks and in trains, buses, subways, and sometimes they like to rob fast food places and banks. Actually scientists have now determined that humans today carry the Neanderthal gene and that there really are some leftover Neanderthals). So is this the truth? It probably took him thousands and millions of years to perfect the inventions he conceived of and finally turned out the true Homo sapien called man.
There is the question of Creationism or the Big Bang and which is the truth. Well God created the heavens and the earth and man and the animals. And the Big Bang just happened. But when scientists do their research and development, aren’t they creating? Scientists have created many things like the smallpox vaccine, new medicines, penicillin, computers, the electric light, the telephone, the TV, and they are continuing to create things. So where is the line between Creationism and the Big Bang? What is the truth? Can we get to this truth through thinking scientifically?
Scientists have determined that the answers we seek are all coined in evolution. It wasn’t a great scientist such as God who created all the many species in the world with all their many differences, but it was evolution – something that just happens randomly, but how can precise measurements and mechanisms such as the intricacies of the human body and all the other creatures and trees and flowers happen randomly? Where did the first seeds come from for trees and flowers?
Go here to find some truths as quoted by famous people.
To read about truth in the Bible check any Bible concordance or try this one.
Perhaps with a lot of scientific thinking we can discover the meaning of truth and finally define truth. Perhaps spiritually oriented people also get to the truth scientifically, not giving up spirituality. Perhaps all people’s perceptions are the truth. Is reality the truth? Or is one’s perception of reality the truth?
