Scientific Conventions of Speech
This brings me to another big misunderstanding a lot of people have about science.
As you can see, scientists have developed a fundamentally different approach to defining reality than anyone else uses. Everyone else uses whatever way of defining reality seems to work best to them, just like people have always done. But what has always seemed to everyone else to be the best way of defining reality has always been affected by their own subjectivity. Scientists, on the other hand, have eliminated subjectivity by requiring that anyone’s work can be replicated by someone else. Anything that can’t meet that requirement doesn’t qualify as science.
When people define reality in whatever way seems best to them—meaning subjectively—it leads them to be certain of some things and uncertain of others. What those certainties and uncertainties are varies from person to person. But the fact that everyone has the same human brain structure means that everyone’s subjective perception of reality is affected in the same basic ways.
Once you feel certain of some things and uncertain of others, you talk about those things accordingly. Any time you meet anyone whose version of reality greatly differs from yours, they still talk as though they’re certain of some things and uncertain of others. You may not agree with the things they believe in, but you can at least recognize that they are certain or uncertain of things that people are supposed to be certain or uncertain of.
People have found innumerable ways to arrive at their definitions of reality, to the point that they can’t understand how another person could believe that their own version of reality was right. If a Mormon and a Buddhist were to talk about life, their words might be almost completely incomprehensible to each other, even though they were both speaking English. But they could still recognize that the other person was talking about certainties and uncertainties that were appropriate for a person to have.
In the same way, a human, a rabbit, a cow, a canary, a leopard, an ostrich, a turtle, and a shark all have the same basic body structure. Each has a head with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, a chest, an abdomen, and four limbs—whether those limbs are two arms and two legs, or four legs, or two wings and two legs, or two pectoral fins and two abdominal fins. If you were walking down the street tomorrow and saw a creature that had five arms, a hundred tiny legs, and no head, that thing would look completely alien to you. You might eventually figure out that it was a sentient being that evolved from a starfish, but until you figured that out, it would not be any form of life as you had known it.
Now I’ve shown you how scientists have developed a qualitatively different version of reality by not using any old version of reality that seems like the best idea to them, but by specifying that subjectivity must be eliminated. Guess what that does to their speaking habits.
Since scientists have eliminated subjectivity from their system of thought, the things they are capable of being certain or uncertain of are different. Their approach to studying the world lets them be certain of things other people aren’t certain of, like that all of life is a chemical reaction, and it prevents them from being certain of things other people are certain of, like the meaning of life.
That hypothetical Mormon and the hypothetical Buddhist might think they disagree with each other about everything, but they do at least agree that all of life isn’t a chemical reaction, and that life has meaning. To them, those things are so fundamental they overlook them and don’t even realize they agree on them. But then if the two of them hear a biologist talking about life, they’ll both think he doesn’t understand anything about life.
When scientists talk about their discoveries, the things they’re talking about sound completely alien to other people. It makes scientists sound like people who just have a lot of weird ideas and who try to tell everyone else what to believe. It doesn’t matter to people that the things the scientists are talking about are true; most people are more concerned with the fact that what the scientists are talking about sounds to them like it isn’t true. If scientists can’t be certain of the meaning of life like everyone else, how much can they possibly know about life? What does biology really prove?
Then a lot of people who are opposed to science pounce on the way scientists talk and make it seem to everyone else like the scientists don’t know what they’re talking about. Anarchists do this to me all the time. Then they usually tell me that if I really knew anything about how to save the world, I’d be sitting around smoking a bunch of weed and learning how to be more open minded like they are.
I should add here that the very word “theory” is something else people who are opposed to science use to undermine support for it. The word “theory” has two different meanings. Among the general public, it’s used as a synonym for “idea”, which translates to “the idea of evolution”. Among scientists, the word “theory” means “a logical conclusion, drawn from observable evidence, that can be used to make accurate predictions”.
Contrary to what most people believe, the word “logic” doesn’t mean, “whatever makes sense to Mr. Spock”, or even, “whatever seems to make sense to someone who wants everyone else to believe they’re Mr. Spock”. The word “logic” means “a systematic approach to figuring something out that leads you to the correct answers”. By that I mean “correct” in the sense that what you predict logically actually happens. The world itself is the judge of whether your logic and your theory work or not. If you predict something and something else happens instead, it proves that your logic was faulty, and that your theory was either incomplete or wrong.
People have been using the Theory of Relativity successfully to build nuclear reactors for about 60 years now. They didn’t do that just because Albert Einstein wrote a paper on how atomic particles ought to behave in his opinion.
The Theory of Evolution works the same way. The Theory of Evolution was easier to discover than the Theory of Relativity, because the Theory of Evolution can be studied by observing plants and animals, while the Theory of Relativity depends on the study of atomic particles. The Theory of Evolution has been a lot more complicated to study, however, because biology is made up of so many more interactions than physics. That means the field of biology contains a lot more information that scientists have to sort through to try to figure out how biology works.
Atomic physicists can build atomic reactors to shatter atoms and see what happens. Then they can use what they learn to build nuclear power plants to generate electricity.
Now we’ve discovered that the entire Earth is a biological reactor, and it has been for far longer than humans have existed. We are a product of the biological reaction, we are a part of it, and we live inside the biological reactor.
And we’ve never known that before now.