There are two basic positions on this issue. One position is that there is no conflict, that they address two different aspects. Steven J. Gould characterizes the situation as "non-overlapping magisteria". And no less an authority than Sir. Isaac Newton agreed with this position. In his time he was more well known as a leading theologian than as a scientist. He devotes a considerable portion of "Optics", his second most famous work after "Principia", to the relationship between Science and Religion. He believed that Science could deliver one kind of truth while Religion could deliver another. He believed that by properly combining these truths a super-truth could be created that was greater and more complete than either lesser truth could provide on its own. And he believed that there was no contradiction between Scientific Truth and Religious Truth. Francis Collins, one of today's leading scientists, also sees no conflict between his strongly held religious beliefs and his strongly held scientific beliefs. But there are few active scientists today that have beliefs similar to Collins.
Some active scientists are in the opposite camp. They are strong and active atheists whose position can be summarized as "all religions are bunk and hokum". Most scientists are in a middle camp however. In religious terms they could be called agnostics. They just don't want to engage in the battle on either side. Some go to church regularly. Some don't. But most of them just want to stay out of the fight. They want to be left alone by the religious types to do their scientific thing. And I think that most religious people are in a similar camp when it comes to scientists. They want to be left alone in their religious beliefs by the scientific types. So, since there is a great consensus (according to me), why all the hoopla?
The answer comes down to the most fundamental of questions: Is there a conflict between Science and Religion? I believe there is. In my previous post (http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2011/10/scientific-method.html) I said "Science is the pursuit of truth". In a fundamental way Religion is also about truth. Consider for a moment what would happen if God made a great revelation to his current prophet. But assume the revelation was full of lies. God would still be God but would it make sense to direct our actions based on revelation? No! All believers believe that the word of God, the revelation, is "divine truth", that God does not lie in his revelations. The word of God is sometimes referred to as "revealed truth" for this reason.
Now, just because God uses what some would characterize as an unusual method to communicate truth, does this necessarily mean that there is some conflict between religious truth and scientific truth? No! Scientists believe some truly weird stuff. Believing that God downloaded true facts directly into the brain of Paul while he was on the road to Damascus would register as "totally normal" on the scientific "how weird is this"-o-meter. Scientists would have no problem with the process as long as it worked. But the real question is: does it work?
I think that many religious people intuitively understand this. They know that there is "religious truth" and "scientific truth". They also believe that there is some overlap and that there are some situations where "religious facts" and "scientific facts" are in conflict. So it is critical to discount the conflicting "scientific facts" so that there is no alternative to the "religious facts". One technique they use is to say "religious beliefs are a matter of faith and not subject to validation". You either believe them or you don't. The problem, as I see it, is that religious people don't believe their own argument. They believe that, at least in some cases, people will believe the scientific argument, and therefore the scientific "fact", and therefore doubt the religious "fact". Religious people can disagree with me and say "faith is sufficient". The problem is that I see a lot of religious people in a lot of places and at a lot of times acting like they doubt their "faith based" argument.
The earliest example of this that most people are familiar with is the fight between Galileo and the Catholic Church in 1616. The fight was over whether the Earth was at the center of the universe, as the Church believed, or whether it revolved around the Sun as Copernicus had suggested. Now most people would wonder what Celestial Mechanics has to do with religion and they would be right. But church people at the time decided that the Bible was a source of reliable information about Celestial Mechanics and that the Bible said that the Earth was at the center of the Universe. So "the Earth is at the center of the universe" became revealed truth. And if one revealed truth was determined to be false then the whole edifice of belief in the Bible tumbled down.
A less drastic solution is possible. One just decides that Celestial Mechanics is not part of revealed truth and the problem goes away. But somehow there is always a reason why that solution is deemed not feasible by religious authorities. The modern version of the heliocentricity conflict is the evolution conflict. Again religious people have decided that the Bible is a good source of information about how plants and animals and people came into existence and how long ago that happened. Scientists in the form of Evolution and related ideas say that the interpretation of this Biblical information by a number of religious authorities, namely that all plants and animals were created at roughly the same time about six to ten thousand years ago, is wrong.
Again there is a way around this. Many religious people have long believed that the Bible is not meant to be taken literally. Instead it should be used as a general guide. The problem with this, the biblical literalists say, is that you can no longer draw a bright line between what is revealed truth and what is general guidance. And they are right. But the alternative, the literalist interpretation, means you are stuck with all the nonsense in the Bible, and there is a lot of nonsense in the Bible. So Christians are stuck between a rock (literalism) and a hard place (fuzzy general guide with no way to draw a bright line). Even if you go with the "general guide" school Science represents a problem. Science keeps evolving. Scientists keep coming up with more and more scientific truth. No one worried about Evolution in Galileo's time. Who knows what piece of new Science will pop up (God particle anyone?) to trouble a currently non-controversial religious belief.
So far I have characterized the issue as being one between Science and Christians. But there are lots of religions out there. Many of them are "prophet" based. God speaks directly to one or more prophets (Mary Baker Eddy, L. Ron Hubbard, etc.). The prophet then spreads "the word of God" to the flock and off we go. As I said previously, one of the key foundations of Science is "whatever works is right" and especially it's reverse, "whatever doesn't work is wrong". Some part of the theology of every religion I am familiar with can be subjected to scientific investigation. There are lots of religions out there. And I am only slightly familiar with a few of them. But Scientists have developed a lot of tools for ferreting out what works and what doesn't. If just one of these tools ferrets out just one falsity in one particular religion's doctrine then the whole edifice falls down for that religion. I contend without proof (e.g. you'll just have to take me on faith) that the doctrine of every prophet based religion has a problem that can be found by applying scientific methods. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to examine non-prophet based religions to see if they have a similar weakness.
It is only necessary for a few people in the community of a faith to be familiar with this weakness. Over and over these people decide that Science is a threat and therefore that it must be attacked. It doesn't really matter what most people of faith or most people of science think. Attacks on Science by people of faith will be made because they must be made.
Science does not have this weakness. It is normal for disagreements to arise between scientists. There are conflict resolution mechanisms built into Science. For those unfamiliar with them they work like this. A Scientist makes an assertion that others disagree with. Einstein famously said "God does not play dice with the universe", for instance. In a faith based environment this would be the end of things. As an authority, Einstein would be deferred to and the Einstein's statement would become accepted doctrine. Instead scientists behave differently. They say "Is there any way we can determine whether it is true or not?" This actually happened. Scientists were able to convert Einstein's general statement into testable specifics. They then devised and executed experiments to examine the testable specifics and determined that Einstein was wrong. The scientific version of "God does play dice with the universe" is true. And so it goes. It is considered normal for accepted ideas in Science to be overturned. So proving some Scientific statement false does not overturn all of Science. It only overturns a small part of it. Such evolution in scientific beliefs is considered to be the normal progress of Science. That's why most Scientific beliefs are called "Theories". The possibility must always be entertained that a particular piece of accepted scientific wisdom will prove to be false in whole or, more likely, in part.
This is a classic case of asymmetric warfare. Religious people must attack Science "by any means necessary" perhaps violating the very standards of morality they purport to believe in (e.g. "thou shalt not lie"). Scientists, on the other hand, do not on the whole feel a need to attack religion. But there is an asymmetric attribute to warfare. It is only necessary for one side to want to go to war for there to be a war. So we have and will continue to have a war between Science and religion.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Scientific Method
The "Scientific Method" is (or at least was) presented in school in an early grade. The standard version is something like this:
It's a 4 step cyclical process consisting of:
1. Gather the facts (observations, results of experiments, etc.)
2. Look for patterns and regularities in the facts.
3. Formulate or revise theories, hypotheses, etc.
4. Devise and execute experiments or plans for additional observations.
Go back to step 1 and repeat.
Science is done by people and is a much more chaotic process than the one listed above. If you want to see a good and entertaining demonstration of the Scientific Method in action I strongly recommend a TV show called "Mythbusters". The two main hosts (Jamie Hynaman and Adam Savage) have exactly NO standard scientific credentials. They come out of the movie special effects industry. This is handy because they have a good sense of how to put together an entertaining show. But they also do good science. Which leads to my first observation: Science is a process or method and anyone who does it is a "scientist" doing "scientific work". Science is not about who you are or what you know. It's about how you go about doing things. And the standard characterization of science and the scientific method obscure as much as they help. So let's go straight to the basics:
Does that mean that the simple procedures employed by the Mythbusters people will sometimes lead them astray. Yes! And they know it. So, like good professional scientists, they occasionally do "revisited" shows where they look at earlier work after it has been criticized by fans of the show. They will redo things a different way. Sometimes the result comes out the same. Sometimes it does not. I think they have done the "chicken gun" test 4 times now. Bitter experience has taught scientists the lesson that "always be prepared for your idea to be shown to be wrong" is critically important to science.
Scientists even go one farther. A modern scientific concept is that of "falsifiability". Is there some way, some set of data or some experimental result, that would definitely prove that your idea is wrong? Now it may be that the experiment is very hard to do, even impossible at this time, but the concept of falsifiability is very important. Scientists have learned to be very leery of situations where the answer is "no". The easier it is to come up with and do an experiment where some result would falsify the theory, the happier scientists are. So they like theories that make predictions that can be tested. When Einstein came up with General Relativity he predicted that the Sun would bend the light from a star when light from that star came close to grazing the Sun. Scientists came up with a situation where this prediction could be tested and went out and did the measurements, measurements that had never been done before. The result came back the way the theory predicted and a different way than it would have come out if General Relativity was bunk. This and other tests of General Relativity were why the theory, which is truly weird, was accepted fairly quickly in the scientific community.
And that brings me to another point. Scientific "truth" is determined by a popularity contest. Scientists argue about everything all the time. For a scientific theory to become accepted wisdom that vast majority of scientists have to accept it. There is no outside objective way to determine scientific truth. What differentiates the scientific endeavor form others in not the "popularity contest" aspect but how the contest is scored. So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to convince the vat majority of scientists that something is true. And what convinces scientists is that thing I noted above, namely "whatever works is right". The emphasis here is on the word "works". So why would you believe that something works?
The obvious and traditional answer is that "some important and respected person says it". The obvious problem is that important and respected people often believe things that turn out to be wrong. Say an I&RP says "the sky is green". But one day you go outside and look up and it looks awfully blue to you. (Actually it is possible for small portions of the sky to be green under certain circumstances, but I'm talking about the whole sky.) Now what if you poll 50 friends, enemies, and strangers and they all agree that the sky is blue? At that point most people would agree that I&RP got it wrong. And that's where science began. About 400 years ago some people got together and they decided that I&RP frequently get it wrong. They said "we can do better".
And they did do better a lot of the time. But they also made a lot of mistakes. So they tried to learn from their mistakes and figure out how to avoid them in the future. And that's where modern scientific techniques come from. Over the years since scientists have tried a lot of things to get to "truth that works". Most of them ended up not working very well. The few that consistently delivered the goods evolved into modern scientific technique. And one common component of modern scientific technique is repeatability. Is someone does an experiment and gets a certain result is that the end of the story? No! Time after time in the history of science people have tried to replicate the result of an experiment and failed. And in many cases it has turned out that the original experimenter goofed in some way. So cornerstones of modern science are:
Another issue that led to the "lab" idea is complexity. It turns out to be really hard to figure out what is going on if you change too many things at once. If you change 100 things at once you don't know which changes are important and which aren't. So scientists are most happy when they can change one and only one thing at a time. I have only scratched the surface of all the ways scientists have found to get the wrong answer over the years. But these modern procedures are all driven by the same simple idea: whatever works is right.
Think about it. If you want to convince me that something is true what is more likely to work: "It's true because I say so" or "I did all these things and I was very careful and here's what happened". Better yet "do this then this then this yourself and see what happens. Now do you believe me?" The thing that makes professional scientists different from you and me is training. It's not the training in a bunch of "scientific facts" or the training on how to operate some piece of complex lab equipment. It is the training on procedures, what procedures work, what procedures don't work, and why various procedures work or don't.
Science can be done by anyone. It can be done by a couple of special effects guys with no formal scientific training. It can be done by a nine year old girl with no special training of any kind. (The "New England Journal of Medicine", one of the most respected scientific journals in the world, published a paper whose lead author was a nine year old girl). The important thing is not who they are, or even for the most part what training they have had. What is important is what they do. Do they do things in a proper scientific manner? Where professional scientists can make a contribution is to review their work to see if they did it right. There has been a big change in Astronomy in the last 10-20 years. Much of the work professional Astronomers now do depends on contributions by amateurs. Professional astronomers have learned that many amateurs do work in a proper scientific manner. And the use of amateurs results in a lot more eyeballs looking up. And some amateurs even have equipment that is professional or near professional in its quality.
Now the scientific ideal is to do the easily replicable experiment in the lab then have others replicate it. But often this is not possible. A classic example is space shots. The one and only space shot to Pluto is on its way as I write this. Scientists can't bring Pluto into the lab and put it under a microscope. They won't even get a chance to send a second space shot to Pluto any time soon. So this is a case of "you go with what you can get" even though it is not "in the lab" and its not repeatable. Scientists have a choice between getting nothing (no data about Pluto) and a less than optimal situation. They go with the less than optimal situation, in this case, way less than optimal. Scientists treat these situations very carefully. The farther away they get from the optimal situation of a repeatable situation in the lab, the more careful they try to be. So they looked a everything on the Pluto mission eight ways from Sunday while they were designing and constructing the mission. That's one reason space shots are so expensive. But the alternative is to spend less money but to get junk (e.g. not reliable) data.
Even so, it doesn't always work. The first mission to Mars looking for life found it. At least that's what the experiments said. So did scientists say "we found life on Mars"? No! They said "we got interesting results from our Mars experiments". Why? Because this was not the first time a scientist had gotten a strange result in a situation where scientists knew little about what to expect. Lots of things had gone wrong in this situation in the past so scientists had learned to be very careful. And it turned out they had not found life on Mars. They found out that the chemistry of Martian soil was not what they expected and the differences messed up their results.
Finally, science is done by people. People make mistakes all the time. They believe that they are doing an experiment in the proper scientific manner when they aren't. They think they know how an experiment will come out or they hope that an experiment will come out in a certain way. So they see what isn't and don't see what is. This "wishing can make it appear to be so" is why scientists like to do "double blind" experiments. These are experiments where the scientists don't know everything (like whether the patient they are examining was given the drug or not) while they are collecting the data. If the scientist doesn't know (until later when the data is "unblinded") then the scientist can't "accidentally" bias the result.
Scientists are trained to do things in the proper scientific manner. So they are more likely than an untrained amateur to get it right. But doing things in the proper scientific manner only ups your chances of getting it right. It may be that there is some yet undiscovered flaw in the current version of proper scientific manner. But it may also be that doing things using a flawed procedure (e.g. not proper scientific manner) gets the correct result because the flaws do not turn out to be important in this case. Looking up in the sky one day by yourself on a clear day and noting that the sky is blue gets you the correct answer even though "your sample size is too small to be significant". In this case the effect is so great (always blue, never green) that you don't need to go through all the scientific rigmarole to get the right answer. So doing things the wrong way may get you the right answer and doing things the right way might give you the wrong answer. Is this really better than the alternative.
Yes! And for two reasons. First, doing things in a proper scientific manner is more likely to get you the right answer. But more importantly, science is really good at determining that a particular answer is wrong. Doing things in the proper scientific manner has demonstrated that what was generally believed to be true is actually false. In the General Relativity example above most people believed that Newton got it right. Einstein came along and said "Newton got it wrong in the following ways". Scientists then followed up by looking very carefully in the places Einstein said to look. And they decided that Einstein was right. And before Einstein, Newton had come along first and said "these traditional ideas of how the universe works are wrong". He then presented his theories and the experiments that showed that the new theories were right and the old ideas were wrong.
And in both cases Newton and later Einstein won popularity contests. There was no august body that awarded either of them a "truth" prize. In both cases they made convincing arguments that their ideas were better than those ideas that came before them. Essentially, that the old ideas were wrong. Both of their new ideas sounded radical and weird to people of their time. People were comfortable with the old ideas. They were very popular both with every day people and with elites, in this case scientists of the time. But both of them won their respective popularity contests, especially among scientists. Why? Because they provided compelling arguments.
Science has become very complex. It frequently involves mathematics far beyond what normal people can handle. And many modern scientific concepts are truly weird. But the way we got here is very basic and sensible. Scientists went about the process of looking hard for the truth. They tried to get the best data they could lay their hands on by, for instance, continually improving their instruments and tools. Then they tested the ideas of the day to see if they fit the data. Frequently they did not. So they were discarded as false. Sometimes all of the ideas of the day were found to be defective. This forced scientists to come up with truly weird ideas. Why? Because none of the non-weird ideas worked. And "[o]nce you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth". Am I now quoting some august scientist or philosopher? No! I am quoting Sherlock Holmes from "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet". But Holmes, in spite of his fictional nature, is just speaking common sense. If an idea is false, it's false. If you are looking for truth it matters not if the idea is popular or "common sense" or any other thing not having to do with whether it is true or not. Science would be a lot easier to do if only sensible ideas were true and all weird ideas were false.
It's a 4 step cyclical process consisting of:
1. Gather the facts (observations, results of experiments, etc.)
2. Look for patterns and regularities in the facts.
3. Formulate or revise theories, hypotheses, etc.
4. Devise and execute experiments or plans for additional observations.
Go back to step 1 and repeat.
Science is done by people and is a much more chaotic process than the one listed above. If you want to see a good and entertaining demonstration of the Scientific Method in action I strongly recommend a TV show called "Mythbusters". The two main hosts (Jamie Hynaman and Adam Savage) have exactly NO standard scientific credentials. They come out of the movie special effects industry. This is handy because they have a good sense of how to put together an entertaining show. But they also do good science. Which leads to my first observation: Science is a process or method and anyone who does it is a "scientist" doing "scientific work". Science is not about who you are or what you know. It's about how you go about doing things. And the standard characterization of science and the scientific method obscure as much as they help. So let's go straight to the basics:
- Science is the pursuit of truth.
- Whatever works is right.
Does that mean that the simple procedures employed by the Mythbusters people will sometimes lead them astray. Yes! And they know it. So, like good professional scientists, they occasionally do "revisited" shows where they look at earlier work after it has been criticized by fans of the show. They will redo things a different way. Sometimes the result comes out the same. Sometimes it does not. I think they have done the "chicken gun" test 4 times now. Bitter experience has taught scientists the lesson that "always be prepared for your idea to be shown to be wrong" is critically important to science.
Scientists even go one farther. A modern scientific concept is that of "falsifiability". Is there some way, some set of data or some experimental result, that would definitely prove that your idea is wrong? Now it may be that the experiment is very hard to do, even impossible at this time, but the concept of falsifiability is very important. Scientists have learned to be very leery of situations where the answer is "no". The easier it is to come up with and do an experiment where some result would falsify the theory, the happier scientists are. So they like theories that make predictions that can be tested. When Einstein came up with General Relativity he predicted that the Sun would bend the light from a star when light from that star came close to grazing the Sun. Scientists came up with a situation where this prediction could be tested and went out and did the measurements, measurements that had never been done before. The result came back the way the theory predicted and a different way than it would have come out if General Relativity was bunk. This and other tests of General Relativity were why the theory, which is truly weird, was accepted fairly quickly in the scientific community.
And that brings me to another point. Scientific "truth" is determined by a popularity contest. Scientists argue about everything all the time. For a scientific theory to become accepted wisdom that vast majority of scientists have to accept it. There is no outside objective way to determine scientific truth. What differentiates the scientific endeavor form others in not the "popularity contest" aspect but how the contest is scored. So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to convince the vat majority of scientists that something is true. And what convinces scientists is that thing I noted above, namely "whatever works is right". The emphasis here is on the word "works". So why would you believe that something works?
The obvious and traditional answer is that "some important and respected person says it". The obvious problem is that important and respected people often believe things that turn out to be wrong. Say an I&RP says "the sky is green". But one day you go outside and look up and it looks awfully blue to you. (Actually it is possible for small portions of the sky to be green under certain circumstances, but I'm talking about the whole sky.) Now what if you poll 50 friends, enemies, and strangers and they all agree that the sky is blue? At that point most people would agree that I&RP got it wrong. And that's where science began. About 400 years ago some people got together and they decided that I&RP frequently get it wrong. They said "we can do better".
And they did do better a lot of the time. But they also made a lot of mistakes. So they tried to learn from their mistakes and figure out how to avoid them in the future. And that's where modern scientific techniques come from. Over the years since scientists have tried a lot of things to get to "truth that works". Most of them ended up not working very well. The few that consistently delivered the goods evolved into modern scientific technique. And one common component of modern scientific technique is repeatability. Is someone does an experiment and gets a certain result is that the end of the story? No! Time after time in the history of science people have tried to replicate the result of an experiment and failed. And in many cases it has turned out that the original experimenter goofed in some way. So cornerstones of modern science are:
- Publish not only your results but the procedures necessary to reproduce your results.
- Someone else needs to use your published procedures to reproduce your results.
Another issue that led to the "lab" idea is complexity. It turns out to be really hard to figure out what is going on if you change too many things at once. If you change 100 things at once you don't know which changes are important and which aren't. So scientists are most happy when they can change one and only one thing at a time. I have only scratched the surface of all the ways scientists have found to get the wrong answer over the years. But these modern procedures are all driven by the same simple idea: whatever works is right.
Think about it. If you want to convince me that something is true what is more likely to work: "It's true because I say so" or "I did all these things and I was very careful and here's what happened". Better yet "do this then this then this yourself and see what happens. Now do you believe me?" The thing that makes professional scientists different from you and me is training. It's not the training in a bunch of "scientific facts" or the training on how to operate some piece of complex lab equipment. It is the training on procedures, what procedures work, what procedures don't work, and why various procedures work or don't.
Science can be done by anyone. It can be done by a couple of special effects guys with no formal scientific training. It can be done by a nine year old girl with no special training of any kind. (The "New England Journal of Medicine", one of the most respected scientific journals in the world, published a paper whose lead author was a nine year old girl). The important thing is not who they are, or even for the most part what training they have had. What is important is what they do. Do they do things in a proper scientific manner? Where professional scientists can make a contribution is to review their work to see if they did it right. There has been a big change in Astronomy in the last 10-20 years. Much of the work professional Astronomers now do depends on contributions by amateurs. Professional astronomers have learned that many amateurs do work in a proper scientific manner. And the use of amateurs results in a lot more eyeballs looking up. And some amateurs even have equipment that is professional or near professional in its quality.
Now the scientific ideal is to do the easily replicable experiment in the lab then have others replicate it. But often this is not possible. A classic example is space shots. The one and only space shot to Pluto is on its way as I write this. Scientists can't bring Pluto into the lab and put it under a microscope. They won't even get a chance to send a second space shot to Pluto any time soon. So this is a case of "you go with what you can get" even though it is not "in the lab" and its not repeatable. Scientists have a choice between getting nothing (no data about Pluto) and a less than optimal situation. They go with the less than optimal situation, in this case, way less than optimal. Scientists treat these situations very carefully. The farther away they get from the optimal situation of a repeatable situation in the lab, the more careful they try to be. So they looked a everything on the Pluto mission eight ways from Sunday while they were designing and constructing the mission. That's one reason space shots are so expensive. But the alternative is to spend less money but to get junk (e.g. not reliable) data.
Even so, it doesn't always work. The first mission to Mars looking for life found it. At least that's what the experiments said. So did scientists say "we found life on Mars"? No! They said "we got interesting results from our Mars experiments". Why? Because this was not the first time a scientist had gotten a strange result in a situation where scientists knew little about what to expect. Lots of things had gone wrong in this situation in the past so scientists had learned to be very careful. And it turned out they had not found life on Mars. They found out that the chemistry of Martian soil was not what they expected and the differences messed up their results.
Finally, science is done by people. People make mistakes all the time. They believe that they are doing an experiment in the proper scientific manner when they aren't. They think they know how an experiment will come out or they hope that an experiment will come out in a certain way. So they see what isn't and don't see what is. This "wishing can make it appear to be so" is why scientists like to do "double blind" experiments. These are experiments where the scientists don't know everything (like whether the patient they are examining was given the drug or not) while they are collecting the data. If the scientist doesn't know (until later when the data is "unblinded") then the scientist can't "accidentally" bias the result.
Scientists are trained to do things in the proper scientific manner. So they are more likely than an untrained amateur to get it right. But doing things in the proper scientific manner only ups your chances of getting it right. It may be that there is some yet undiscovered flaw in the current version of proper scientific manner. But it may also be that doing things using a flawed procedure (e.g. not proper scientific manner) gets the correct result because the flaws do not turn out to be important in this case. Looking up in the sky one day by yourself on a clear day and noting that the sky is blue gets you the correct answer even though "your sample size is too small to be significant". In this case the effect is so great (always blue, never green) that you don't need to go through all the scientific rigmarole to get the right answer. So doing things the wrong way may get you the right answer and doing things the right way might give you the wrong answer. Is this really better than the alternative.
Yes! And for two reasons. First, doing things in a proper scientific manner is more likely to get you the right answer. But more importantly, science is really good at determining that a particular answer is wrong. Doing things in the proper scientific manner has demonstrated that what was generally believed to be true is actually false. In the General Relativity example above most people believed that Newton got it right. Einstein came along and said "Newton got it wrong in the following ways". Scientists then followed up by looking very carefully in the places Einstein said to look. And they decided that Einstein was right. And before Einstein, Newton had come along first and said "these traditional ideas of how the universe works are wrong". He then presented his theories and the experiments that showed that the new theories were right and the old ideas were wrong.
And in both cases Newton and later Einstein won popularity contests. There was no august body that awarded either of them a "truth" prize. In both cases they made convincing arguments that their ideas were better than those ideas that came before them. Essentially, that the old ideas were wrong. Both of their new ideas sounded radical and weird to people of their time. People were comfortable with the old ideas. They were very popular both with every day people and with elites, in this case scientists of the time. But both of them won their respective popularity contests, especially among scientists. Why? Because they provided compelling arguments.
Science has become very complex. It frequently involves mathematics far beyond what normal people can handle. And many modern scientific concepts are truly weird. But the way we got here is very basic and sensible. Scientists went about the process of looking hard for the truth. They tried to get the best data they could lay their hands on by, for instance, continually improving their instruments and tools. Then they tested the ideas of the day to see if they fit the data. Frequently they did not. So they were discarded as false. Sometimes all of the ideas of the day were found to be defective. This forced scientists to come up with truly weird ideas. Why? Because none of the non-weird ideas worked. And "[o]nce you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth". Am I now quoting some august scientist or philosopher? No! I am quoting Sherlock Holmes from "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet". But Holmes, in spite of his fictional nature, is just speaking common sense. If an idea is false, it's false. If you are looking for truth it matters not if the idea is popular or "common sense" or any other thing not having to do with whether it is true or not. Science would be a lot easier to do if only sensible ideas were true and all weird ideas were false.
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