Fundamental New Knowledge Calls for Change in Science

Does anybody like change, if they don't see what good will come of it? On the other hand, who doesn't want change, if they think it will improve their lives?

This article is a call for change in science, because the author is a physical scientist who sees the need for change, but it is more: It is a call to re-think our view of human origins, and our view of the Earth, which we all call home.

There is great difference of opinion in our views of how everything on Earth came to be. There is the scientific view and the religious view, for example, and they tend to focus on the world and its inhabitants in different ways. Science and religion give different answers because they have different aims and focus on different problems, but also because the people in both (even and especially the "experts" in both) are still ignorant of much of the underlying truth of things. And where they focus on the same things, such as how the creatures on Earth--including Man--came to be, they are still guided by different outlooks, and they are vividly, starkly divided, to the point of unending, poisonous argument.

Religion is also fundamentally divided itself, into many competing faiths, as the nightly news reminds us every day. This is an age-old problem, the deepest wound of Mankind on Earth.

Most people are aware that science and religion are mutually divided, and that religion is divided within itself, but they don't realize that science is also divided, in its own fundamental beliefs. People think science has discovered so much, and has been so successful, that there is little left for scientists to disagree about (even "expert" scientists sometimes think this is so). But if you search the internet for such disagreements, even among the "experts", you can find them. No large fraction of the general population, however, has the time, inclination, or education to do what scientists themselves should be doing: confronting all the available evidence and, far more often than they might like, admitting they don't know enough to judge between different views, or to harmonize them.