Chapter Content
So, I grew up, you know, in East Los Angeles, in the Mexican barrios there. My parents, super hard workers, really loving, and we didn't have much money, but honestly, I never felt like we were poor, you know? Most of my family, they were laborers, maybe a high school education at best. But me? I was always kind of the oddball, *el bicho raro* of the family, you know? And I dreamed of being a scientist.
I was totally in love with the scientific method. Like, obsessed. In my mind, it was this replacement for blind faith, for prejudice, for superstition. It was all about logic, objectivity, truth. It was my savior, really. My best hope, I thought, for getting out of the barrio and, you know, having a really exciting life.
I had these idols, you know, scientists like Ivan Pavlov. He believed that the scientific method would deliver humanity from its "present gloom," which, wow, that sounded amazing to me. And Karl Pearson, who, you know, basically said you can't really understand the universe without the scientific method. Which, these days, sounds a little bit like, uh, you know, "I am the way, the truth, and the life," kind of stuff.
And nowadays, the scientific method is even more revered, I think. People are, like, "It's the ultimate explanation!" But, alas, when I got to Cornell, things changed a little bit. I started to lose some of that naive, you know, almost religious belief in it. I finally saw how things actually worked, you know, the shortcomings of the scientific method, and the scientists who were using it.
So, by the time I was heading to Harvard, I understood the scientific method for what it really is. It's a really amazing tool for understanding a tiny bit of the physical world, basically nothing about metaphysics. It says it's all about logic and objectivity, but it really needs faith to even work. And honestly, it's not even really well-defined.
Descartes, who helped come up with the whole thing, basically said it has four steps: Be open-minded, be systematic, be analytical, and be exhaustive. Sounds good, right? But if you look online, you'll see a bunch of websites that say it has five steps, six, seven, eight, or even that it has *no* hard-and-fast steps.
It also changes depending on what you're studying, right? Astronomy is different than biology, and that's different than zoology, and so on. Lab experiments are different than field experiments, where it's harder to control things.
Someone else said, look, science is just what scientists *do*. And there are as many scientific methods as there are scientists. And today, I get what that means. The scientific method is notoriously imprecise.
Sure, scientists mostly follow some general guidelines when they're designing experiments, collecting data, writing up results, but we all do it with our own style, our own gifts, our own quirks. Like, we're musicians just jamming in a jazz band.
And it doesn't help that it's not taught very well. I mean, I never took a class on the scientific method, and I'm a scientist. People just sort of expect you to figure it out and accept it with unquestioning faith.
So, in other words, science is a perfect example of believing is seeing. You have to believe in the scientific method and follow it carefully to see the truths that you can't see any other way. If you don't buy in, you won't see those truths. It's that simple, and that profound.
So, at its core, it's a belief system. It's not this completely objective thing, like people sometimes say.
Some groups even say, "Science is non-dogmatic," and "Science never requires ideas to be accepted on faith alone." Which is just, no.
Science is actually pretty dogmatic. For starters, it says that scientists have to accept the scientific method on faith, even if they don't know exactly what it is. It needs to police itself, just like a religion, to prevent chaos.
Science is also dogmatic about everyone kowtowing to its current thinking. Skeptics aren't really welcomed.
And science *does* require that we accept certain ideas on faith alone. Like, for instance, that science is good for the world.
Think about it.
Science was made to explain the universe and make our lives better, right? What else is the point?
And, yeah, science has made our lives better in a lot of ways. But it's also made them a lot more stressful, right?
Because of science and technology, we now have global environmental problems, nuclear weapons, cyber warfare. Any of those could destroy civilization.
These threats have kind of ruined our peace of mind. There are studies showing that a lot of people are lonely, depressed, addicted, or, you know, even committing suicide.
Schools are letting kids take days off just for stress. It's because our kids are bearing the brunt of a quickly-changing society, you know, with social media and all the bad news.
So, the emotional and spiritual problems caused by science and technology are pretty big. We can't really say that science deserves all the blind faith it asks for.
Science might lead us to a utopia, I hope it does, but we can't really prove it will. And there's plenty of reason to think it's leading us down the wrong path.
Today, science is way more secular than it used to be. It doesn't want explanations that talk about God or anything too metaphysical. It only wants logical, material explanations.
But that doesn't mean science agrees with atheism or that the material world is all there is. Atheists might say that, and they might want you to believe that, but it's not true.
Science is just saying that it only wants to explain the material world. And it wants to do it with logic. That's it.
You can complain about science going secular, but, like it or not, science can make its own rules, just like any other religion.
Anyway, what hasn't changed is that science is still based on faith. It still requires belief in things that we have evidence for, but no real proof.
For example, here are three things that science believes in that you have to have faith in.
First, the universe can be explained.
Science believes that, given enough time, everything can be explained. Einstein thought it was a miracle that the world was even comprehensible.
Early scientists didn't worry about mentioning God in their explanations. They thought science was just the study of God's creation.
For them, God was totally rational, even if he didn't always act in a logical way.
The idea that everything can be explained came from a Christian, actually. He thought that we couldn't avoid going to God as the ultimate cause of everything.
Someone else created a seven-step scientific method "for gaining access to the effulgence and closeness to God." He said that the best way to understand God was to search for truth and knowledge.
He did experiments with light to understand God's glory.
So, the people who made the scientific method believed that the universe was rational and explainable, and that by studying it, they could understand God better.
These included, you know, a lot of people, and it grew into the science we have today.
Someone else said that metaphysics is the root, physics is the trunk, and all the other sciences are the branches.
Second, the simplest explanation is always the best.
This also came from a Christian. It's called Ockham's Razor.
It basically means, why use a complicated explanation when a simpler one will do? Keep it simple.
Like everything else, Ockham's Razor can't be proven, so you have to accept it by faith. But science has been successful by sticking with it.
But there are some problems with it.
First, it's hard to judge what is simple, right? Like, our universe seems to be designed for life.
One explanation is that there's a designer. Another is that our universe is just one of countless universes.
Which one is simpler? Is a designer more far-fetched than an infinite number of universes?
I mean, you can see what I mean.
Second, *if* Ockham's Razor is true, why is it true? Why does nature need simplicity? It just makes the mystery bigger.
Third, Ockham's Razor doesn't really apply to everyday life. My life isn't simple at all.
Someone else said, the scientific method is almost perfect for understanding the physical world, but it can't offer values, morals, and meanings that are the most important parts of our lives.
Third, doing experiments is the best way to understand the universe.
This is something that science really believes in. Before the scientific method, people would just sit around and argue about how the world worked.
Scientists still do that sometimes, but now they do experiments to settle things. And it's made a big difference.
I remember reading about people doing experiments as a kid, and it made me want to be a scientist.
In grad school, I finally got to do a real experiment. It was supposed to study subatomic particles.
It was exciting at first, but then it was sort of disappointing. Scientists aren't like the heroes I read about. Experiments aren't simple anymore.
The experiment I was assigned to needed a big team, a building full of equipment, and this huge atom smasher that other scientists were operating.
And the things we were studying were too small to even see. We had to guess they existed based on data.
It wasn't like catching lightning in a bottle.
I realized that it wasn't just me. Scientists in every field are kind of far removed from the reality they're trying to explain.
Paleontologists will draw conclusions about entire species from just one jawbone.
Astronomers make claims about aliens based on planets that they can't even see, but think exist because of changes in the stars.
Psychologists come to conclusions about everyone based on studies of college students.
And there are other issues with science. We also have to think about the uncertainties that come with designing, doing, and discussing scientific experiments.
Designing an experiment starts with finding some simple part of a complex thing that you can actually measure.
Like Earth's climate. It's super complicated. To understand it, you have to start small, like measuring air temperature or sea levels.
After you pick something to measure, you have to figure out how to do it. Measuring air temperature sounds easy, but it's not. What kind of thermometer do you use? Where do you take the measurements? It's not simple at all.
It's no wonder so many scientists get it wrong.
A team looked at the designs of 2,671 experiments that tested new drugs on animals. This is life-and-death stuff for people.
They found that most of the experiments failed in four key areas: sample size, randomization, blinding, and conflicts of interest.
And it was even worse in the UK. Most of the experiments didn't even report one of those four critical things.
Once you design an experiment, it takes months, even years, it has to be approved. Then, you have to start working.
I did my first lab experiment in college. It needed radioactive stuff, equipment, and hours of careful measurements.
I had to trust my own skills, but also trust that the equipment worked.
Back then, the equipment was simple enough that I could trust it. Today, things are different.
Scientists have to trust complicated equipment they don't understand, and the technicians who operate it. Everything from space telescopes to MRI machines.
They also have to trust their colleagues, who they might not even know that well. And grad students who don't have much experience. And government people, industry leaders, administrators, and rich people who approve the experiments and pay for them.
That's a lot of faith.
And there's a lot of evidence that it's misplaced.
A journal surveyed 1,576 scientists and found that most of them had failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments. And a lot had even failed to reproduce their *own* experiments.
This is called the reproducibility crisis. It's happening in the most respected journals. Which means something is really wrong with how science is being done.
After you do an experiment, you have to analyze the results. And that's tricky because the data can be understood in a lot of different ways.
The conclusion that gets published is just one possible interpretation, and maybe not even the best one. Maybe the scientist has a bias. They're only human, after all. Like everyone else, scientists have their own biases that affect their conclusions.
In 1928, someone published a study about sexual customs in the South Pacific. Her conclusions said that the society there was laid-back, peaceful, and that the teenagers were sexually free and happy.
She said that love between the sexes was "a light and pleasant dance." And that rape was totally foreign to their minds.
But that was all wrong.
Someone else published a report that totally discredited the original claims.
He found that the people there were violent, jealous, and uptight. Rape convictions were way higher than in the US and Great Britain.
How did the first person get it so wrong?
She was convinced that culture shapes people's behavior more than genetics, and that's what she saw. Her bias corrupted her analysis.
Believing is seeing.
And it turned out she only interviewed young girls, not boys. And they lied to her about having free sex. She was tricked because it confirmed her bias.
Her dishonesty really messed things up. Her romanticized stories "misinformed and misled the entire anthropological establishment."
It's an extreme case, but it's not the only one. A study found that a lot of scientists knew of people who had done "questionable research practices." And some even knew of people who had just made up data.
And the study was based on people reporting themselves. So, it was probably a low estimate of how much scientific misconduct there really is.
Even with all these problems, I still think the scientific method is our best way to understand the physical world. I don't think it's humanity's savior, but I still have faith in it.
And I'm not worried about science being secular. Science can play by whatever rules it wants. And the scientific method being secular doesn't mean that science disproves God. Remember that.
What does bother me is when people refuse to see that the scientific method was born and raised by faith, and that it continues to live and thrive by faith.
Wake up!
The things that science believes, like the idea that everything can be explained, the simplest explanation is always best, and doing experiments is the best way to understand things, are all based on faith. Science is a faith-based thing, not just a logical algorithm.
Without faith, science couldn't exist. It takes both logic and what some might call spiritual intelligence, the kind of faith that comes from really understanding the world.
A lot of animals have logic, but only humans have created the scientific method because only humans have that spiritual intelligence.
Without it, we wouldn't care about anything beyond survival.
Without it, we wouldn't spend the time, money, and energy to send spacecraft to other worlds or dream about going to the stars.
Without it, we wouldn't write books and think about the meaning of life and be proud that we know the difference between a protein and a protozoan.
But we *do* have that intelligence. And because of that, we invented science. Which is amazing proof of how unique we are.