Reckoning with the Mortally Inevitable - a podcast by PDF feed of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

[Page vii]Abstract: Every human enterprise — even the best, including science and scholarship — is marred by human weakness, by our inescapable biases, incapacities, limitations, preconceptions, and sometimes, yes, sins. It is a legacy of the Fall. With this in mind, we should approach even the greatest scientific, cultural, and academic achievements with both grateful appreciation and humility. J. B. Phillips’s rendition of Paul’s words at 1 Corinthians 13:12 captures the thought nicely: “At present we are men looking at puzzling reflections in a mirror. The time will come when we shall see reality whole and face to face! At present all I know is a little fraction of the truth, but the time will come when I shall know it as fully as God now knows me!”





It can be argued even now, in this age of social-media-facilitated skepticism, that science enjoys the greatest universal prestige of any cultural phenomenon in the modern world. And not without justice. Its achievements — from its development of vaccines and medicines that have saved and extended the lives of millions, through its creation of astonishing earthly technologies, to its ever-progressing exploration of space and its peering back to the very dawn of creation in the Big Bang — richly merit the respect they typically receive.

Yet science is an inescapably human endeavor, pursued and interpreted and employed by fallible mortals. Its history is instructive in many ways — not least as a stage upon which human weaknesses, errors, and biases are fully displayed. An article in a recent issue of Scientific American takes a brief but clear-eyed look at a small selection of embarrassing episodes in that venerable magazine’s own past.1 More on that shortly, though.

[Page viii]This issue of Scientific American is full of articles worthy of notice. With Moritz Stefaner and Jen Christiansen, for example, Lorraine Daston considers “The Language of Science: How the Words We Use Have Evolved Over the Past 175 years.”2 Maryn McKenna’s “Return of the Germs: For More Than a Century Drugs and Vaccines Made Astounding Progress against Infectious Diseases. Now Our Best Defenses May Be Social Changes,” leads off with a confident prediction made by the distinguished Australian virologist Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet (d. 1985), a Nobel laureate, in his co-authored 1972 book Natural History of Infectious Disease. After surveying with distinct satisfaction the rise of antibiotics and the triumph of vaccines over smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella, and polio, Burnet opined that “The most likely forecast about the future of infectious disease is that it will be very dull.”PDF feed of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

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