The Veneer of Science

I went into the GNC store to purchase a new supply of ON Gold Standard 100% Whey protein shake powder. The store was full of boxes on the floor being opened and unloaded, with one employee there working and doing everything to get them organized.

While he helped me with my choice of flavors. He mentioned that they were “moving back in again”, and he got to unpack all the boxes and put everything up, just the way it was supposed to. It was better for his OCD to do that than when trying to put regular, disorganized shelves back in order.

I realized that this was something our society does. We take ordinary things, and we talk about them “scientifically”. We take ordinary life events and describe them in scientific terms, as if we have control and understand things better in the “real world” by having scientific terminology to describe it. We are a culture where science is truth.

But as I have discussed in other posts, science may be knowledge,  but it isn’t truth, and there are many types of science, many types of knowledge. Our culture uses the illusion of science as truth to pretend we have the answers or an understanding of situations.

So this veneer of pseudo-scientific assurance covers all our conversations, our assurance of knowledge hiding the discovery of real truth.