Science Is Not A Religion
Why “listen to the science” is a fatuous imprecation
It’s fashionable to proclaim “listen to the science!” as if this were an incontrovertible statement. In reality, there is no monolithic science to which we can listen, for science is the ongoing process of discovery and different researchers see the same phenomenon in a variety of different — and often contradictory — ways. Furthermore, popular accounts of scientific findings are often so misleading as to be worse than useless.
But still the average quasi-educated person thinks “science” is a miraculous process by means of which scraps of wisdom are handed down to ordinary people in the slender gaps between reality TV shows and social media updates.
People with less education and limited intellects, conversely, reject “science” because they are unable to grasp even the most basic concepts. For these people, usually religious and usually drawn to far-right ideologies, the everyday magic of cellular phones, automobiles, airplanes, GPS systems, electronic funds transfers, and everything else in their lives is simply magic and most likely “god’s will.” We can ignore these people because they are irredeemable. This article will concern itself only with people who think they understand “science” but in reality have very little concept of what science truly is. For such people the word “scientific” is an imprimatur of unquestionable authority.
To understand why we persistently mistake the productions of science as god-like infallible utterances of Absolute Truth, we need some context. The first piece of context is that the human brain doesn’t handle ambiguity very well. Brains are pattern-recognition engines and the human brain is a very elaborate pattern-recognition machine indeed. When there aren’t patterns, we imagine them into existence because that gives us an illusion of understanding things. For thousands of years, people thought they saw shapes in the stars; even today children play at recognizing shapes in clouds. We want simple rules but reality is complex, so we ignore reality much of the time in order to avoid having to accept the fact our rules are useless, or worse.
Charlatans take advantage of this human trait all the time, by making infantile pronouncements based on the pictures on…
