Why the Sun Really Shines (Really This Time)

In class today we mentioned Karl Marx's view that science serves to replace nonsense with less absurd nonsense. I do agree with his view on the matter; science is indeed very fallible. There are many people who treat science as though it were a similar dogmatic force as the religion that they oppose. When asked certain things about how they believe the universe is governed they suggest that they know certain things. This song is a catchy cover of the education song written in 1959. Maybe scientists were less dogmatic about their studies in the past, but this is still a good example of how science is fallible.

This song (Why the Sun Shines) is sort of juxtaposed with the song (Why the Sun Really Shines) found after this block of text. In the second song the artist clarifies that the scientific thesis of the sun being a mass of gas has been rendered invalid. This does not however mean that there is no way that this song could also be wrong; maybe the sun is not made of plasma either. We are more confident, however, that the sun is not composed of what we recognize as gas.

None of this is to say that we should disbelieve any conclusion that scientists reach, only that it could very well be wrong but, given our technology it is the best answer we have. We should not blindly accept any scientific solution as a fact of the universe because it is very likely to change. The story of the Big Bang, for instance, should not be accepted as the definite truth of the universe, it is simply one of the best hypotheses that we have at the time, as technology improves the answers will get better.

As a final note, the unchanging thesis are not automatically better or correct because they have not changed. The view that God created the universe has been around for a much longer time, and has remained relatively unchanged aside from minor variations. That unchanging nature of that belief does not mean that it is more stable and therefore more probably true.