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Some people accuse science of being ‘arrogant’, ‘biased’ and ‘just one way of looking at things’.

Anyone who understands what science is will know that it is categorically not any of these things. In fact it is almost the opposite of all three.

At some point in history some people came to the realisation that human beings find it extremely hard to be objective. They are swayed by emotion, they see what they want to see, believe what they want to believe. They are BIASED.

These people became frustrated that nobody seemed to be able reach any agreement about what was true, so they tried very hard to study and observe existence without any bias, and they devised methods to prevent them from being distracted from their objectivity. They had invented science, for that is what science is.

Science is a set of approaches and methods that try to enable us to observe nature objectively. That is what it is, nothing less, nothing more. It’s a simple idea but it is profoundly important because it is so hard to be objective without it.

Science is certainly not arrogant. Scientists are more ready than anyone to change their minds or to say they don’t know. And they would never say ‘this is right because science says so’, they would always say, ‘I believe this to be right because of the following evidence’.

Science is clearly not biased. It is by definition an attempt to avoid bias.

Science is an attempt to avoid all the ‘ways of looking at things’ and just look.

Science then, is not a subject, it is an approach. It is an attempt to find the truth; and attempt to remove from investigation any influences that may distort or obscure the truth.

 

Ironically, in trying to defend science against the ‘arrogance’ charge, a lot of people fall into one of the many traps that science was set up to avoid. They go too far the other way.  

The phrase, ‘there is no such thing as a fact’ was recently uttered by Steven Fry no less, during an episode of QI. ‘Whatever we think are facts now,’ he went on, ‘a lot of them will be considered to be wrong in a few years time.’

In making this assertion, he had in fact fallen into another of the classic traps – ignoring the grey areas. In science, there isn’t just right or wrong, fact or falsehood. There is a continuous range, all the way from things we are almost certain about, right through to things about which we have no idea. My use of the word ‘almost’ certain is a philosophical point rather than a practical one. We are sure enough about the vast majority of scientific knowledge to be able to use it to build all the technological wonders of the modern age.

Steven Fry gave the evolutionary driver of the Giraffes long neck as an example of a scientific ‘fact’ that became false and was replaced with a different fact. The point is it never was a fact. It was a ‘current theory’. And it wasn’t proved ‘wrong’, it was replaced with a better theory.

Most scientific knowledge stays the same for long periods. It is mostly just at the edges of knowledge where there is a lot of adjustment going on as knowledge is increased or refined.

Even the marvellous Brian Cox recently fell into yet another of those traps. He was trying to counter the idea that science is cold and logical by stating that science is basically an emotion.

What he should have said was, yes, the scientific method has to be cold and logical to avoid all the human biases. The emotion comes in the passionate desire to understand the wonder and beauty of nature and the excitement pleasure at finding out.