If I could only teach the world just one thing, it would be that science is simply our best tool for building a workable model of the objective, natural world. This is important for three reasons.

First, science can be used as a tool to construct useful, useless, fascinating, mundane, or potentially risky additions to our knowledge of the world. What research is done, and what uses are made of the resulting knowledge, are not determined by science, but by our human society. The scientific method is not responsible for the dropping of the atom bomb upon Hiroshima, nor for the mass manufacture of drugs that can save the lives of those infected with HIV, nor for the inability of impoverished citizens of developing countries to obtain those drugs.

Second, with all of the unknowns and uncertainties that still face us, the model that science builds has proven impressively reliable in practice. This model has enabled the human race to control diseases that used to kill millions of people, to be the first living things ever to walk upon the lifeless face of the moon, and - in countless great and small ways - to control nature for our own benefit.

Third, science includes the caveat that the scientific method - testing hypotheses by experiment, against empirical evidence - is reliable only when dealing with the unconscious, purposeless, natural world. Human beings are subject to the laws of biology. Unlike atoms, amoebae and rats, however, we also have free will, and the capacity to pursue our own ideas. Models based upon animal behaviour, or based upon the flow of water, give limited insight into the behaviour of people. Science can never give a complete explanation of what it is to be human.

See Timandra Harkness' website.