The Scientific Method

Facebook post from a friend:

The term "anti-science" or "science denier" is hilariously misused. The act of science is the questioning and testing of falsifiable statements. Taking a fact in faith as an accepted truth is true anti-science.

My responses:

Exactly! Another term that is almost always an oxymoron is calling history class "social science". History is a VERY DIFFERENT field of study that has very little to do with science.

sci·en·tif·ic meth·od

/ˈˌsīənˈtifik ˈmeTHəd/

noun

a method of procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.

"criticism is the backbone of the scientific method"

Science is about what we can observe, measure, experiment on, and test in the PRESENT. We also have to be very careful when we try to extrapolate from current scientific observations and apply them to the past, future, or phenomena we don't have enough information about yet. The further we extrapolate away from solid scientific observations to make theories (which so many try to pretend are solid conclusions), the weaker the theories are and less and less credence should be given to them. Examples:

PAST

The debate about the age of the earth is a classic example. SCIENCE CANNOT DETERMINE THE AGE OF THE EARTH! Science can only measure the present and try to extrapolate back to the past, and has to make many assumptions. For any age to be calculated, some measurement of change at present rates must be calculated, and then one has to assume how it was in the beginning, and that the rate has been constant over time, and then the present rate is extrapolated into the past. And it's prone to WILD error. It's like saying when the score is 6-0 only 1 minute into an NBA game, that the final score will be 288-0. When it comes to age of the earth, any evidence like a fossilized tree (which normally would have decayed in small number of years) being buried and preserved through multiple geological layers that were supposedly were laid down over millions of years must be ignored, because the "scientists" don't like evidence that contradicts their theories. But a wise person can trust far more that the current scientific measurements are reasonably accurate without taking it on faith that unscientific extrapolations about the distant past have much validity at all.

FUTURE

Global Warming / Climate change is a classic example of extrapolating into the future (and of corruption of the recent data itself, but that's another topic). Climate has always changed and variability is natural. Sometimes average global temperatures trend up and sometimes they trend down. Since the late 1800's they have trended up overall. But when they trended down from 1940-1970, many "scientists" extrapolated that present (at the time) rate of cooling and proclaimed humans were causing a new Ice Age. Less than 10 years later, after temperatures trended upwards again, some of these same "scientists" did a 180 and extrapolated the last 5-10 years (at the time) rate of warming and boldly and hypocritically proclaimed CO2 emissions were going to destroy the planet. They've been pushing that line ever since, even when global average temperatures didn't go up between 1998 and 2015. The predictions made in the late 90's by most of the computer models at the time of rapid warming by 2020 were falsified by the current temperatures now in 2021 being below even the lower bounds of most of the models' predictions. So no wise person should put any stock in predictions about 2050 or 2100. There's just as much chance that temperatures may be lower by then than they are now. We can trust that scientists can predict fairly well the path of a hurricane over the next 2-5 days, but we'd be fools to trust at all they can predict average global temperatures in 2050. That is wild extrapolation of the current science.

PHENOMENA WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH INFORMATION ABOUT YET

No one knows what the long term effects of a mRNA vaccine will be.