either supports or challenges somebody’s vested interests.
Consider Galileo’s 1633 indictment by the Roman Catholic Church, which was at the time the seat of global political and economic power:
The proposition that the sun is in the center of the world and immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures.
The proposition that the earth is not the center of the world, nor immovable, but that it moves, and also with a diurnal action, is also absurd, philosophically false, and, theologically considered, at least erroneous in faith.
Therefore . . . invoking the most holy name of our Lord Jesus Christ and of His Most Glorious Mother Mary, We pronounce this Our final sentence: We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo . . . have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world; also, that an opinion can be held and supported as probable, after it has been declared and finally decreed contrary to the Holy Scripture.
Why did the church go to such lengths to deal with Galileo? For the same reasons we fight political battles over issues like climate disruption today: facts and observations are inherently powerful, and that power means they are political. Failing to acknowledge this leaves both science and citizens vulnerable to attack by antiscience propaganda—propaganda that has come to infiltrate politics and much news media coverage and educational curricula in the early twenty-first century. The war on science has steered modern democracy away from the vision held by its founders, and is threatening its survival.
Wishing to sidestep the painful moral and ethical parsing that their discoveries sometimes compel, scientists for the last two generations saw their role as the creators of knowledge and believed they should leave the moral, ethical, and political implications to others to sort out. But the practice of science itself cannot possibly be apolitical, because it takes nothing on faith. The very essence of the scientific process is to question long-held assumptions about the nature of the universe, to dream up experiments that test those questions, and, based on the resulting observations, to incrementally build knowledge that is independent of our beliefs, assumptions, and identities, and independently verifiable no matter who does the measuring—in other words, that is objective. A scientifically testable claim is transparent and can be shown to be either most probably true, or to be false, whether the claim is made by a king, a president, a prime minister, a pope, or a common citizen. Because it takes nothing on faith, science is inherently antiauthoritarian, and a great equalizer of political power. That is why it is under attack.
Who Defines Your Reality?
The scientific revolution has proven to be more beneficial to humanity than anything previously developed. By painstakingly building objective knowledge about the way things really are in nature instead of how we would wish them to be, we have been able to double our life spans and boost the productivity of our farms by thirty-five times. With careful observation, recording, testing, and replication, we have been able to give children to those who were “barren” and the fertile the freedom to decide when—and whether—to reproduce, freeing women by providing choice. Science has released us from a life that was, according to Thomas Hobbes, “a war . . . of every man against every man . . . solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
In Hobbes’s era, economics was a zero-sum game: “Without a common power to keep them all in awe,” he wrote, men fell into war. There was finite wealth and opportunity, and to get ahead I had to take some of it away from you. In its capacity to create knowledge, science broke that zero-sum economic model and generated wealth, health, freedom, and power beyond Hobbes’s wildest dreams. It produced tremendous insights into our place in the cosmos, into the inner workings of our own bodies, and into our capacity as human beings to exercise our highest aspirations of love, hope, creativity, courage, and charity.
Each step forward has come at the price of a political battle. Also, too often, they have come at the cost of the environment. As we continue to refine our knowledge of the way nature really is, independent of our beliefs, perceptions, identities, and wishes for it, we must also refine our ethics and morality, assuming more responsibility for our choices. Inevitably, this is uncomfortable, because the process throws many reassuring notions into conflict with our new knowledge—notions that are often our most deeply rooted, ancient, and awestruck explanations about the primacy of our clan, the wonders of creation, the specialness of our identities, and the possibility of life after death.
The Power of the Scientific Method
How do we create knowledge? There is no one “scientific method”; rather, there is a collection of strategies that have proven effective in answering our questions about how things in nature really work, as opposed to how they at first appeared to work to our common senses, or to scientists or theologians with less precise measuring tools than the ones we now have. How do plants grow? What is stuff made of? How do viruses work? Why are montane voles promiscuous sex fiends while prairie voles are loyal lifelong mates? The process usually begins with a question about something, and that suggests a strategy for making and recording observations and measurements. If we want to learn how plants grow, for example, we begin by looking at plants, not rocks.
These initial recorded observations suggest a hypothesis: a possible explanation for the observations that partially or fully answers the initial question. This hypothesis must make a risky prediction, one that, if true, might confirm our conclusion or, if false, will destroy it. If there’s no possible way to prove the hypothesis is false, then we aren’t really doing science. Saying plants grow because God wills it is a statement of faith rather than a statement of science because (a) it’s not limited to the natural world, and (b) it cannot be disproved. Therefore it can’t be tested and so it can’t produce any real knowledge. An article of faith is an assertion. A statement of science can be tested by observing nature to see if it’s likely true or not. Nature is the judge.
After we set out our hypothesis, we design and conduct experiments that test the hypothesis and try to disprove it. If we can’t disprove it, we conclude that it may be true and write a paper detailing what we did and concluded, and outlining ways the conclusion could be tested further. We send it to a professional journal, which sends it to others who have knowledge of the field (peer reviewers) to see if they can tear any holes in it. Was our method sound? Did we make any mistakes? Did we control all the possible influences on the outcome? Are there other explanations we didn’t think of? Was our math right?
If these peer reviewers discover any holes in our logic or methodology, they send it back for more work. But if they conclude that it is solid and transparent enough to stake their reputations on, they recommend our paper for publication. Once it is published the process is not over. Others who read it may then set out to disprove it. If they can, their stars rise and ours fall proportionately. But if they confirm what we found, the conclusion becomes a little more reliable. In this way, we slowly, meticulously create knowledge that is objective: it is independent of our identities, and replicable by anyone.
The method is fallible, since our senses and our logical processes are easily influenced by our assumptions and wishes, and so they often mislead us. But over time the method tends to catch those errors and correct them via peer review and replication. Thus, bit by careful, painstaking bit, we build a literature of what we know, as distinct from our beliefs and our opinions—and as we do, we gain power.
How Old is Earth?
One example of knowledge, as opposed to belief or opinion, is the age of Earth. Geological measurements show, over and over, no matter who does the measuring, that Earth is about 4.54 billion years old. This is something one can learn to measure for oneself. It’s called radiometric dating, and it’s pretty simple. Radioactive uranium isotopes decay at known, measurable rates into stable (nonradioactive) lead isotopes, and radioactive potassium isotopes decay at known, measurable rates into stable argon isotopes. By using a mass spectrometer one can buy on eBay for about $2,000, one can count how many atoms of a particular uranium isotope are