Science And Pseudoscience

How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we do not understand difference between the myths of pseudoscience, New Age thinking and fundamental zealotry and the testable hypothesis of science? Can we prevent such celebrated fallacies such as witchcraft, faith healings, demons, and UFO’s from virtually banishing scientific thought? Science carries us toward an understanding of how the world is, rather than how we would wish it to be. Though its findings may not in all cases, be immediately comprehensible or satisfying. But when we pass beyond the barrier of questions, when the findings and methods of science get us through, when we fully understand and put this knowledge to use, we can feel deeply satisfied. Science has illuminated the way to truly stupendous advances by human beings in a few centuries. As science has upset some truly ancient religious beliefs in its theory of evolution, it has also upset some clergy. They’ve responded with witch hunts, torture chambers, executions, and truly boggling contemporary brainwashing campaigns. Each questions basic notions about where as species came from and are headed. Without condemning these reactionary trends, there is a better way to understand such matters. The answer is science.
Pseudoscience
Science arouses a sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. It’s a vessel in which bad claims in pseudoscience drives out...

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... alerts us to the perils introduced by our world-altering technologies, especially to the global environment on which our lives depend. Science provides an essential early warning system that can save millions of lives, from chaos, destruction and natural disaster.
Science teaches us about the deepest issues of origins, natures, and fates-of our species, life, our planet, of the universe. Science confers power on anyone who takes the trouble to learn it. Science is a way to call against mysticism, superstition and misapplied religions. Science, I maintain, is an absolutely essential tool for any society with a hope of surviving well into the next century with its fundamental values intact, not just science as engaged in by its practitioners, but science understood and embraced by the entire human community: and if scientists will not bring this about, who will?