And the debate continues, but that is the nature of science, ever changing based upon new evidence and how the evidence is interpreted. During the plague year of 2020 many false things were said as if they were revealed truth, but one that was utter blasphemy to the true spirit of science was, “The science is settled”.
In The Beginning
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
The nature of science is that science is unsettled.
Only the truth of God is settled.
I was in the polio epidemic of 1950s. People were afraid, very afraid.
Sister Kenny, the March of Dimes, no swimming, no standing in line at the grocer. We quarantined ourselves.
When Jonas Salk found a vaccine of dead polio viruses in 1960 everybody got a sugar cube with it.
Albert Sabin made a vaccine with crippled live viruses that sometimes caused the disease. Some people later in life developed polio.
Instead of thanking God for eradicating the pestilence, some morons think that science did it without God.
These are the people who would have died for disobeying the laws.
From the internet:
“During his lifetime Sabin staunchly defended his live-virus vaccine, refusing to believe any evidence that it could cause paralytic poliomyelitis. Salk, for his part, believed that killed-virus vaccine produced equivalent protection in individuals and in communities without any risk for causing paralysis. Despite Sabin’s belief, the risk for paralysis from the live-virus vaccine does exist, although it is slight. In 1999 a federal advisory panel recommended that the United States return to Salk’s vaccine because it cannot accidentally cause polio. On the basis of a decade of additional evidence, this recommendation was reconfirmed in 2009.”
It took 50 or so years to settle that science. BTW, Italy delayed formal approval of the Sabin vaccine for several years because of this risk.
As a retired physicist and one who has studied the history of science I can agree with Mary Devoe that “The nature of science is that science is unsettled.” The demise of the Caloric Theory, that organic molecules do not have a life force, that there is no ether drift, all testify to this. See Chapter 2, “A Science Primer for the Faithful.” And please excuse the shameless self-promotion.
“Einstein was impressed with Lemaître’s math, but he did not like the universal implications, because it suggested then, if the universe was expanding, that if you rewound time, you would go back to a beginning, and therefore the universe was not eternal, but had a start when it was an infinitely small speck. In fact, there is a semi-legendary account that Einstein told Lemaître, I like your math, but I don’t like your physics.
In other words, I can’t argue with your numbers, but the implications for physical reality, I don’t like. Well, what did Einstein do? He reworked Lemaître’s formulas, but he added a constant into the formulas that would balance out the universe.”
…
He called it the cosmological, or I’ve heard it sometimes called the cosmic constant, which balanced the formulas and prevented the universe from expanding. Why did Einstein do that? Again, because he didn’t like the idea of a universe that had a beginning, because that would suggest perhaps a God who had called the universe into existence.
Einstein himself was an agnostic and he was very much uncomfortable with notions of a divinity. Now, Einstein later admitted that this introduction of a cosmic constant or a cosmological constant for no other reason than to balance the formulas to resist expansion was wrong. He shouldn’t have done that.
It was quasi-unethical and he admitted that later.
From John Bergsma’s Stunned by Scripture Podcast: The Origin of the Cosmos, Oct 25, 2025
Podcast
The science IS settled.
Our *understanding* of it is not.
More interesting to me is how the same people who spout off that the science is settled are also likely to argue for a malleable reality – on everything from gender to cats in boxes.
In partial defense of Einstein’s comment, mathematics can sometimes give a solution (e.g. one of the two roots of a quadratic equation) that has no physical existence. Gases are routinely treated as point-masses for Gas Law calculations, which of course is only a convenient approximation when the particles are widely separated. Physical reality is superior to its mathematical descriptions. A good modern example is the problem of describing both relativity and quantum mechanics under one common master set of equations.
Even the smartest guy at Apple has changed his mind on “climate change”. Beware of rich people who have the best intentions for others as their goal of life. What could go wrong?
Science isn’t a body of knowledge, it’s a process of obtaining knowledge; The Word–Logos–the way the universe works is established by God and has been effected by His Son, but that isn’t science.
Bob Kurland-
Though I thoroughly agree with the definition of science as you properly state it, the definition in common parlance is closer to how I used it – a body of facts.
So, when I said that science is settled I was referring to a set of immutable facts established by God on how the universe functions that does not change unless suspended by God (ie creation from nothing, virgin birth, bilocation etc )
Language drifts. CS Lewis lamented this when he was asked to address a group of airmen in WWII. He found that many terms used at university to discuss history and religion were understood to have a completely different meaning to the airmen, who had mostly not been to university.
Bob – hats off to your life’s work in pursuing our understanding of the world. Even I don’t understand the knowledge that science has discovered. A lot of the time.
Science is the pursuit of knowledge. The pursuit will continue until the Second Coming. What we humans know will never be final in all things.
When a leftist says the science is settled, brace yourself because you’re about to hear some of the most unscientific BS you have ever heard in your life!