Does science cause as many problems as it prevents?

Question

I understand it has made modern life easier, but some biochemical pathways are so complex that you cannot treat one problem without causing another.

Empirical physical and natural science.

The atom bomb is a concept as well.

Answer 1

How does science, (a methodology of validating the usefulness of conceptual constructs) cause problems? Science is niether good nor bad, it's how people choose to use it.

Answer 2

Science has produced good things. Science has also produced good things that have been used for bad purposes. The world is not a friendly place. The abusive use of a destructive scientific discovery is the fault of the people who perform the actions, not the science which discovered it.

Science in general has improved the human condition in ways you are not even able to comprehend. Without the kind of discoveries that uncovered atomic energy your parents would most likely be dead right now. It is likely you would not have survived childhood. If you did you would be malnourished and perhaps disfigured. Your body would be a host to a multitude of parasites. You would not attend school. You would work from dawn to dusk, eating pretty much the same thing day in and day out.

You ask a more specific question: Does science cause as many problems as it solves? No, not really. It can take a while to work through a problem. Sometimes a problem isn't able to be solved with the science of today. Perhaps there will never be a scientific means of solving a particular problem. However, with each experiment there is a larger body of knowledge on which future scientific data can be piled. After a while perhaps there will be a breakthrough. After all, Rome was not built in a day. Even at it's worst, science is not likely to cause *more* problems than existed, so we're no worse off because of it.

Answer 3

Science have to define science here right? The application of knowns to a problem until a monetary benefit results... that sum it up?

My answer to this question is yes.... The stuff we call science costs a lot and it's only available to a very few and furthermore stinks and won't go away... The applications of science are usually not warranted and in the end only make a mess we'll never clean up right?

I wish you had asked is science all it's cracked up to be... but this is not the case so science without intuition and just plain human aspiration can only cause grief more grief and oblivion right?

My latest nightmare is this one they invent a pill that cures everybody of a certain pathophysiological manifestation and after twenty years everybody is sterile and it's the planet of the apes.... much like thalidomide did until a little more science got us out of that one....

So in the end science may make things worse without a little common sense.

Coroner

Answer 4

Of course - science will lead to the destruction of the human species. There used to be something called "natural selection" that kept balance in nature. Now that humans have conquered this there will eventually be out of control population, death and basically the end of the world.
Aren't you glad you asked?

Answer 5

Science is a collection of facts which lead to reproducible results under the specified conditions. People get into trouble when they attempt to apply scientific principles to unproven "facts".