Science vs. Politics
A lot of people tell me I can’t use science to tell everyone what to do. This is another misunderstanding. Scientists don’t tell people what to do. Politicians are the ones who do that. Scientists know that anyone’s ability to gather information is limited by their ability to perceive the situation. If someone else can’t replicate your work, what you’re studying isn’t science.
Politicians assume that knowing more about science than someone else proves they know everything. But that only proves they don’t understand what science is or how it works. Then they try to apply science selectively to advance their political goals. That isn’t science either, that’s just somebody making stuff up and pretending to use science to prove he’s right. If you aren’t looking at all the evidence, what you’re studying isn’t science.
That brings me to the big difference between science and any other means of studying the world. Science is the study of observable evidence, with the goal of drawing logical conclusions from that observable evidence, which can be used to make accurate predictions. Scientists form hypotheses, which means they think of things that might be true and then look at all the related evidence to see whether it proves the hypothesis or disproves it.
Ultimately, science isn’t a college degree or a job title. If you use that basic process of observation and discovery, you are using science as a system of thought—regardless of what your education and occupation are called.
Any other way of studying the world begins with people deciding, either consciously or subconsciously— maybe even very subconsciously—that something is true, and then looking for evidence to prove they’re right. You could feel it to be true emotionally or intuitively, or believe it’s true because you learned it from a religion, or because philosophically you feel that’s how the world should work, or whatever. That isn’t a hypothesis, because deciding that something is true ahead of time clouds your vision.
That includes deciding ahead of time that an unprovable belief that your new idea is founded upon must be true. The term “Christian Science” is a complete misnomer. It’s a co-optation of the word science. There’s no such thing as Christian science, because Christianity isn’t science. Accepting unprovable religious beliefs as true and then building upon them in a scientific manner isn’t science, because the information you started with wasn’t science. The same is true for Scientology and any other scientific approach to building upon non-scientific information.
Individual scientists make mistakes, and even get emotionally attached prematurely to things they think they’ve discovered. But science as a field of study is self-regulating, because if proving that something is true depends on preventing people from looking at certain evidence, what you’re studying isn’t science, by definition.
The world itself judges whether your logic was correct or faulty. Logic, by definition, means using partial evidence in a situation to figure out what the rest of the situation must be. When you use your partial evidence to figure out what the rest of the situation is, it’s the situation itself that proves whether you were right or not.
A jigsaw puzzle is a logic puzzle, because each piece fits into the puzzle in only one way. You can hold the pieces up next to each other and try to figure out whether they fit together or not. That’s the logic. Then you can try to fit the pieces together. That’s the test. If the pieces fit together, your logic was right. If they don’t fit together, your logic was wrong. Period. You can’t make puzzle pieces fit together by believing they should fit together, or feeling like they should fit together, or having the opinion they should fit together.
The universe is a giant jigsaw puzzle. Science is the act of fitting the pieces together.