What is Science?

What is Science?
Science is often conceived as a body of knowledge. Reflection, however will lead to the conclusion that this cannot be its true nature.

History repeatedly shown that a body of scientific knowledge that ceases to develop soon ceases to be science at all.

The science of one age has often become the nonsense of the next. Consider, for example, astrology; or again, the idea that certain numbers are lucky or unlucky.

With their history unknown, who would see in these superstitious the remnants of far-reaching scientific doctrines that once attracted clear thinking minds seeking rational explanations of the working of the world?

Yet such, in fact is their origin. So too, we agree at the explanation of fossils as the early and clumsier attempts of an All-powerful Creator to produce the more perfect beings that we know ourselves to be.

Science is no static body of knowledge but rather an active process that can be followed through the ages.

The sheer validity and success of the process in our own age has given rise to a good deal of misunderstanding of its native and not a little misapplication of such terns as ‘science’ and ‘scientific’.

There is nothing in the laws of this or any other country which forbids its citizens from giving worlds of their language such significance as they may choose, but science and scientific as employed in these connection have no relation to the great progressive acquisition of knowledge.

The very from of the adjective ‘scientific’ might give pause to those who would force the word to cover such topics as the skill of the boxer, or a knowledge of the theory and practice of the sacraments.

By derivation scientific means knowledge making, and no body of doctrine which is not growing, which is not actually being made, can long retain the attributes of science.
What is Science?