Skip to content
GAMSATready

GAMSAT Section 2 quote prompts: Science

1 GAMSAT-style prompt on science. Each gives you five comments that disagree, so your job is to find the tension and argue a clear position. Give yourself about 30 minutes per essay.

Task A · ArgumentPrompt 1 of 1

Consider the following comments on science.

  • Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself.

    Richard Feynman

  • Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

    Albert Einstein

  • Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

    Anonymous

  • Science tells us what we can do, never whether we should.

  • Every certainty science offers is provisional, which is precisely why we should trust it.

Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.

A way into this prompt

A defensible thesis is that science is humanity's best method for learning what is true while being a poor guide for deciding what is good. Open by honouring the achievement, that the method of testing and discarding ideas has cured diseases and overturned comfortable error. Then complicate it: knowing how to split an atom or edit a gene tells us nothing about whether we ought to, so science needs ethics as a partner, not a rival. A strong third move treats the provisional nature of science as a feature, contrasting honest uncertainty with the false confidence of dogma. Caution: resist the lazy relativism that, because science can be wrong, treats every opinion as equally valid.

Write this and mark it free