What to believe? Science is a red herring and a wild-goose chase

Henry Bauer
scimedskeptic.wordpress.com

 o be certain about things is reassuring. It allows feelings of safety, security.

For knowledge, for understanding the world, humankind seems to have turned at first to what could be inferred from the spirits of things — the spirits associated with or inherent in everything: in mountains, in trees, in bodies of water. The spirits could be understood, at least partly, because they were similar to people in having emotions and desires.

Eventually — quite recently, only a few thousand years ago — the plurality and hierarchies of spirits and gods yielded to monotheistic religions in most parts of the world. Even more recently, and only in the most powerfully developed countries, religion yielded to science.
That is to say, traditional religion yielded to scientism, the religion of science. Even the monotheistic gods have emotions and desires, but science doesn't. So knowledge became entirely impersonal, at least in principle.

Nowadays, then, for real certainty we look to science. "Scientific" stands for unquestionably true. Science is the gatekeeper of truth. "Science" and "scientific" are mediators of being certain, being sure about something.

Consequently, a great deal of arguing to-and-fro has to do with whether something is scientific:

• Does it emerge from use of the scientific method?
• Is it reproducible?
• Is it falsifiable?

And if a claim doesn't satisfy those criteria or equivalent ones then it's dismissed as not scientific, or as pseudo-science, or as just plain not to be believed.

That's an indirect way of judging believability, and arguments about whether something is scientific can be and have been highly abstract, complicated, and sophisticated as technical philosophical discourse tends to be.

Instead, why not go directly at the issues of certainty and truth and just ask, what does it take to be justifiably and reliably certain about something? 

Read more