Science and reality
A further and more contemporary example was the Coronavirus pandemic (2019 – 2023), a pandemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, also called SARS-CoV-2 (Mayo Clinic, 2024b). Based on existing knowledge of coronaviruses and their impacts on the respiratory system, and applying the rigorous scientific method, scientists were able to study the novel coronavirus and devise appropriate treatment and preventative measures, such as social distancing, the use of face masks, and quarantining (separating people from country A entering country B to the ones already in country A to prevent the spread of infectious diseases). Moreover, scientists took previous knowledge from vaccine studies of SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and other viruses to develop effective vaccines to combat the Coronavirus (Mayo Clinic, 2024a). This is an example of science helping improve both our lives and our ability to understand the world around us. At first glance, science may not seem like it can help us understand the intangible things in life, such as emotions like love, as the two things seem so different from each other (science involves rigorous testing and systematic execution but emotions are mostly impulsive, fleeting reactions). However, science can be used to explain emotions. Scientists can use the scientific method to work out the neural pathways of the brain that cause these emotions. For example, neuroscientists can conduct an experiment where doctors perform a CT scan or an MRI scan on a person’s brain to collect data. The data can then be sent back to the neuroscientists to be analysed and compared with their original hypothesis. On the 23rd of April 2019, scientists Jonathan Levy, Abraham Goldstein, and Ruth Feldman published a study which found that the neural development of empathy is sensitive to caregiving and early trauma (Levy, Goldstein and Feldman, 2019). They studied 84 children, half of whom were exposed to chronic war-related trauma for the first 10 years of their lives. The scientists wanted to know if factors such as parenting and anxiety disorders had an impact on the neural development of the emotion empathy. The children had a magnetoencephalography (MEG) scan of their brains while watching people in distress. The findings showed how the relationship between a child and their mother, the child’s mental nature, and trauma have impacts on the formation of empathy during early development. This is an example of the scientific method helping humanity understand more about something seemingly less related to science. Although it may seem that science can explain everything, there are a number of things that even science, with all its careful and logical deduction, cannot explain. For example, science cannot make moral decisions – science can help us understand what the world is like, but it cannot tell us whether the world is good or bad (Berkeley 2024b). Also, science cannot explain aesthetic judgement in humans – it can analyse the features that make a piece of music beautiful to human ears, through thousands of repeated experiments, but in the end, every reaction to a piece of music is subjective and no one explanation can account for all of them ( ibid. ). Further, science does not guide us on how to use knowledge – for example, although science can give us information on how nature operates, it does not tell us what to do with that information ( ibid. ). Take, for example, the atomic bomb. Scientists discovered how the process of nuclear fission works, but the scientific knowledge that was discovered did not also push us to create a weapon of mass destruction that killed tens of thousands of women and children (95% of the population of Nagasaki and Hiroshima) at the end of WWII (Bird and Sherwin, 2005). Science also cannot give answers to supernatural questions – supernatural forces are, by
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