Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

The Marriage of Science and Religion 191
shared examples rather than abstract “laws,” so that Newtonian mechanics,
which is a constellation of shared models of the way things work, might
be thought of as a paradigm, and so might Newton’s second law of motion,
which is only part of the first.
The paradigms are the central, focal feature of science. Normal science
is conducted under periods of stable paradigms; these are times when the
paradigms are accepted without question. They are the focus of all research,
but they are not tested or subjected to potential falsification: rather,
they are “articulated” (23). This means that the labors of scientists under
conditions of normal science are directed toward explaining more and
more of the world in the terms defined by the paradigm. This sort of research
is analogous to puzzle solving. It is not an open-ended search for an
answer that may or may not exist. For this reason basic scientific research
is very different from that directed to solving human problems, such as the
search to find a cure for cancer. A cure for cancer may not in fact exist.
Every puzzle, however, has a correct answer; the difficulty lies in how to
arrive at it. Normal science is a matter of solving such puzzles (37). The
counterexample is not then a fatal falsification but a challenge to be overcome.
Normal science is like a complex jigsaw puzzle, and the paradigm is
the picture on the top of the box. Normal science is occupied with bringing
facts that apparently contradict the paradigm into its domain. One way in
which normal (rather than revolutionary) science approximates the myth
of science is that only normal science is truly progressive and cumulative.
During periods of normal science more and more puzzles are solved and
more and more facts are brought into the fold. The paradigm accretes authority
and power. It becomes increasingly immune to doubt. Eventually,
however, cracks begin to show. Puzzles prove recalcitrant, impossible to
solve. Patterns of unsolvable puzzles develop. Uncertainty creeps into a
world of supreme confidence. Doubt emerges, and the paradigm goes into
crisis. This new stage, the crisis of the paradigm, is for scientists “a period
of pronounced professional insecurity” (68). Ordinarily at this point rival
paradigms appear and intense debate ensues until a new paradigm is established
in the place of the old. Only when dealing with a full-blown crisis in
the paradigm does a scientist “look almost like our most prevalent image
of the scientist” (87). “Almost” because although there is intense debate
and scrupulous examination of the evidence, the proponents of the competing
paradigms do not really proceed rationally and then decide together
which best fits the facts. They have different assumptions and in some