“And thy response shall be: ‘Nothing hear our prayer’,” said the high priest of the Church of Science.
“Nothing hear our prayer,” intoned the congregation.
“For we shall be a light unto the world.”
“Nothing hear our prayer.”
“And that light shall illuminate only what we say it shall illuminate.”
“Nothing hear our prayer.”
“What we say goes.”
“Nothing hear our prayer.”
“And even when we’re wrong, we’re right.”
“Nothing hear our prayer.”
There exists a strain of criticism that suggests science is just “another way of knowing”, and that “science” is no different than any other religious belief system. It has its dogmas, myths, rituals. This criticism is misguided and ultimately wrong, but it’s not hard to see how it arises.
Many people are like the terrified villager in the movie Young Frankenstein who, upon learning that scientist and grandson of Baron von Frankenstein Gene Wilder moved to town, said “All those scientists are the same. They say they’re working for us. But what they really want is to rule the world!.” In my case this is, of course, literally true. But it isn’t so for most scientists, whose biggest ambition is to have all their grants funded and to get out of teaching Freshman Science 101.
Another reason people don’t trust scientists is they are perpetually patting themselves on the back. They often sound like the congregation above. I was reminded of this when reading a rambling and often self-contradictory editorial by Richard C. J. Somerville “How much should the public know about climate science?” in the journal Climatic Change (DOI 10.1007/s10584-010-9938-y). Somerville displays a typical scientific ego:
Science has its own high standards. It does not work by unqualified people making claims on television or the Internet. It works by expert scientists doing research and publishing it in carefully reviewed research journals. Other scientists examine the research and repeat it and extend it. Valid results are confirmed, and wrong ones are exposed and abandoned. Science is self-correcting. People who are not experts, who are not trained and experienced in this field, who do not do research and publish it following standard scientific practice, are not doing science. When they claim that they are the real experts, they are just plain wrong.
In reality there are only beliefs that are true, those that are false, those that are uncertain, and those that are nonsensical. There do not exist scientific truths, scientific falsities, scientific uncertainties. Saying that a truth has been proved scientifically is no different than saying that a truth has been proved—period. The only usefulness in the word “science” lies in its categorizing certain branches of investigation. “Scientist” is a job description, not an imprimatur.
It matters not one bit how one reveals a truth, whether the person who discovers it wears a white coat, or whether the discoverer discusses his truth on television or on the pages of a journal. This is obvious: what’s true is true, what’s false is false. A person with a credential does not make a truth truer, nor a falsehood falser. Just as a person without a credential does not make a truth falser, nor a falsehood truer.
Somerville, like many before him, often tout that “Science is self-correcting.” To which we can say, “Oh yeah? How do you know?” Many scientists made false statements before Somerville, so what makes him sure that what he believes now won’t be proven wrong by the scientists that come after him? It is human nature—a commonplace in science—to believe that wherever you stand is the pinnacle. After all, whenever we look up we are blinded by the light of our own knowledge. All we can see clearly is that who came before us were not as high on the mountain as they thought they were.
It is true that, through history, knowledge has increased, but it is not necessary that it always should. This is because is also true that falsehood has, at times, increased. If Somerville believes he has a truth that bears emphasis, it would be better for him to lay out the evidence which he believes prove his truth (he only provides guesses of the future). He should not rely on the fallacy that what he believes is true because he is a scientist.
——————————
Thanks to our pal Willie Soon for brining this article to our attention.
This statement, “Valid results are confirmed, and wrong ones are exposed and abandoned,” reminds me of the phrase about the Iran-Contra deal” “Mistakes were made.” Somerville’s passive sentence leaves out who does the confirming, exposing, and abandoning. Of course, passive sentences are the stock and trade of research and not at all surprising. Still, who does the confirming and exposing? I suspect that Somerville alludes to scientists within the specialty field being discussed. An exclusive club. “May I see your membership ID?” Non-members may not vote.
McIntyre was not a scientist, but he certainly could expose poorly designed statistical methods. And that’s the truth.
Science is a process — the process of stating a hypothesis and performing an experiment to test and prove or test and disprove the hypothesis. A hypothesis that predicts what will happen in the future is unproven (and unprovable) until the future arrives. Predicting the future is the job of seers and statisticians — the former with certainty, the latter with probability.
One who practices science is a scientist. White coats, degrees and academic titles are interesting but just theater.
An expert is somebody with a great deal of knowledge about, or skill, training, or experience in, a particular field or activity. (Encarta Dictionary) … do[ing] research and publish[ing] it following standard scientific practice … is not required.
OK – except about climate “science” publication.
“Other scientists examine the research and repeat it and extend it.”
Except “climate science” which does not use raw data, does not retain even adjusted data let be the raw data, does not allow use of the “data” by others, does not publish methods used to analyse “data” or the preceding “adjustment” methods…
There are many working in the field who do NOT work this way, probably most. But the ones who get attention from politicians and press are, as normal for humans (yes, including me), the ones who are loudest irrespective of actuality.
Thus, after “justifying” the lack of Medieval Warm in the (Mann) “hockey stick” by first saying it was localised to Greenland, then West Europe (basicallly the UK), then Europe, we end up with Prof Jones while visiting Australia admitting it was the whole of the Northern Hemisphere but we have insufficient data about the Southern – so (by implication) it is OK to assume that for every degree of warmth in the North there is an equal or greater cooling in the South, and the “hockey stick” was/is just dandy…
Without replication, there is little chance for science to “self-correct.”
‘A person with a credential does make a truth truer’
I think it is true to say that the above in the third but last paragraph would benefit from the insertion of a ‘not’?
Have you learned from your mistakes? Yes, I can repeat them exactly.
This Sommerville fellow is really funny (as in haha funny).
First he says that
“The standard skeptical arguments have been refuted many times over. The refutations
are on many web sites and in many books.” (emphasis mine)
Then:
“Science has its own high standards. It does not work by unqualified people
making claims on television or the Internet. It works by expert scientists doing research
and publishing it in carefully reviewed research journals.”
So we should understand from his line of reasoning that the “standard skeptical arguments” have not been refuted. 😉
Chuckles,
Typo. Fixed; thanks.
You could even add that “Science” is not a “kind” of knowledge, it is knowledge. The very word science comes from the latin scientia, meaning knowledge.
This is the usual religious/new age/superstitious apologetics defense.
I’m glad you have this view (but how could you not?)
Check out Roy Spencer’s (from book’s back cover “leads the U.S. science team for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS on NASA’s Aqua satellite”) newest book, THE GREAT GLOBAL WARMING BLUNDER: HOW MOTHER NATURE FOOLED THE WORLD’S TOP CLIMATE SCIENTISTS.
Yes there are true beliefs, false beliefs, uncertain, and nonsensical. But there are people who, by training, experience, intellectual capability, etc. are better equipped to determine the likelihood that a given belief, which beliefs in the field in which they have undergone this training, experience, etc. is true or false and its likely degree of uncertainty. Such people might be called, for lack of a better word, “experts.”
Expertise can be gained in more ways then the traditional college-grad. school-post doc-associate prof.-tenured prof. path with its attendant need to solicit grants and publish papers. But that doesn’t mean that one who has chosen that path is not an expert. If I have a dull, nagging pain in my abdomen, I’m vomiting frequently, I have blood in my stool, I’m not going to consult web sites, read blogs, etc., I am going to one who has been to college, medical school, been an intern, a resident, and, where necessary, had specialty training. I’m also not going to watch a TV “holistic” doctor, go to an acupuncturist, buy an energy balance bracelet, see a chiropractor, or have my aura adjusted.
Earned expertise is a thing to be sought in its area of application, not derided by those who have not earned it, WHATEVER THE METHOD. If the doctor above tells me I need surgery, chemo, and radiation therapy to treat my abdominal cancer and someone on TV says I can treat it by diet, exercise, meditation and positive thinking, I’m going to believe the doctor.
Science incorporates many things. Some have to do with tradition, e.g., the peer review process, etc., but at its most fundamental level it’s a way of utilizing a systematic method to gain increasing understanding of the way “the world” works.
Speed claims that “A hypothesis that predicts what will happen in the future is unproven (and unprovable) until the future arrives. Predicting the future is the job of seers and statisticians — the former with certainty, the latter with probability.” One who predicts that, in about 5 billion years our sun will use up its hydrogen fuel and expand into a red giant based on observational evidence of stars NOT ONE OF WHICH HAS BEEN SEEN TO UNDERGO THIS CHANGE is doing science. He or she is neither a statistician nor a seer. To contend otherwise is ridiculous.
Science may be slow to self-correct but it is self-correcting, to list examples would be a waste of time.
Scientists have every right to claim the high ground in their areas of expertise, just as do chess grandmasters, NBA franchise players, etc.
“It does not work by unqualified people making claims”
Yeah, what about that Einstein fellow. Just a lowly patient clerk. What does he know about that ether stuff that transmits light through space.
The main problem with “climate science†is that the largest part of physics is not science. Physicists cut themselves off from science by refusing to go beyond mathematics to evaluate all interacting factors which shape natural phenomena.
Math is so limited and daunting that it cannot represent a single point in a perfect manner, while science requires an evaluation of the integration of all complex influences on a subject. The integration of complexities must be subjective, because it is way too complex for mathematical representation. In other words, scientists must bring together all knowledge on a subject and evaluate it subjectively to produce the best possible conclusions. That’s not what physicists do in most of physics or climatology.
@ James Gibbons
No one claimed Einstein wasn’t qualified. And how were his thoughts on photovoltaics, brownian motion, and special and general relativity communicated? Why, they were (just slightly paraphrasing from Somerville) “published in carefully reviewed research journals. Other scientists examined the research and repeated it and extended it. Valid results were confirmed, and wrong ones were exposed and abandoned” (though in Einstein’s case, very little of the latter). By the way, from his notes, he did not rely on and may not even have know of Michelson Morley. His results came from accepting Maxwell’s derivation of the speed of electromagnetic waves.
Let me take the last 3 sentences from Somerville – “Science is self-correcting. People who are not experts, who are not trained and experienced in this field, who do not do research and publish it following standard scientific practice, are not doing science. When they claim that they are the real experts, they are just plain wrong.”
First sentence: Semmelweiss was in an asylum before the medical profession decided that maybe he was correct; scientists believed for many years that that phlogiston existed; doctors were confident that lifestyle caused stomach ulcers until proved wrong. I ponder how long it will be before the pretenders with their climate models, recognised by even the IPCC as incomplete and incorrect, are proved wrong?
Second sentence: this is virtually “Trust me. I’m a scientist” (chortles with laughter). Perhaps he should have added “and my friends peer-review all my papers”. I’m an analyst, Mr Somerville, and I can see errors of logic, big assumptions and lots of assertions in your work. Are you trying to prevent me from saying so? Is the flawed work you do really called “science”?
Third sentence: Show me anyone sceptical of the notion of significant manmade warming that has said “I am an expert on this and all the alarmists are wrong”. I know of no-one.
Somerville is just continuing the path of the moment. “Global warming” didn’t get enough attention it became “climate change”. When that failed to grab attention the activists split into one group shrieking “ocean acidification” and now “biodiversity”. The other group says it’s a failure of communication and launches an attack on anyone who doubts them.
Practice science with integrity Mr Somerville, especially when it comes to observations, and maybe we’ll take note.
@ John McLean
I certainly wouldn’t make excuses for any bad things that happened to Semmelweiss but one of his problems was his refusal to publish. Phlogiston, ulcers – you are making Somerville’s case.
As to the second sentence, I don’t read any implication of Somerville asking anyone to trust him or the equivalent. But the world is full of circle squarers, angle trisectors, relativity overturners, Brown’s gas zealots, overunity nut cases, and faux Lords, etc., all demanding respect and attention they haven’t earned. Credibility and expert status IS EARNED.
@ machiavellian
The distinction which seems to have escaped you is research versus the refutation of specious claims.
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Rob Ryan,
You say …
One who predicts that, in about 5 billion years our sun will use up its hydrogen fuel and expand into a red giant based on observational evidence of stars NOT ONE OF WHICH HAS BEEN SEEN TO UNDERGO THIS CHANGE is doing science.
Change predicts to hypothesizes and your statement will be true … if One sticks around for about 5 billion years to finish the experiment.
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@ Speed
Thank you for agreeing with me.
A bit of house keeping is in order. The author makes the statement, “…person with a credential does make a truth truer, nor a falsehood falser.” The quote should properly be, “…person with a credential does NOT make a truth truer, nor a falsehood falser.”
stan,
to some, “self correct” means “I asked myself and determined I was correct”. No replication required.
The proper claim of science should be: “we’re not sure but this is the best we know now.” Anything more is marketing, of the used car sales variety.
Rob Ryan,
You said, “Thank you for agreeing with me.”
I was not and do not.
@ Luis Dias
Perhaps you can offer a logical explanation of the point made by Edward Feser (in his writings on scientism) that those who argue that all knowledge comes from science are making a philosophical argument that itself cannot be proven scientifically.
Luis,
Knowledge is also knowledge. How about we use that word? In English, saying knowledge for knowledge is a lot less confusing than saying science and meaning knowledge. Some people, when they hear science, think of inclined plans and the like, and not logic, syllogism, and such forth.
You are being more sullen as time goes on, my friend.
The honorable Petersan has a good point. Study it.
@ Speed
Your point seems to be that, somehow, “predict” and “hypothesize” are fundamentally different. This is quibbling of course, but if you want to quibble, the hypothesis that our Sun will use up its hydrogen fuel and expand into a red giant in approximately 5 billion years is not testable by a living scientist. Are you claiming that someone who studies the evolution of stars utilizing the observational tools of astronomy (the intellectual construct of the main sequence, spectroscopy, modeling of the temperature and pressure gradients of stars, etc.) and who, based on this study makes that statement that “it is likely that our Sun will use up its hydrogen fuel and expand into a red giant in approximately 5 billion years” has not done science and is not making a “scientific statement?”
@ Rob Ryan
But considering Einstein was qualified intellectually yet working in an entirely different field, I think the current climate club would think of him the same way they think of people like Steve McIntyre and would dismiss him without any thought. His theory of special relativity was such a simple and reasonable description of the things the experimentalists were seeing and couldn’t be ignored. I think people were slightly more open minded in some ways back then, but you still had some clubs like the Royal Society and there were some games played by its members when it came to discoveries and the credits attached to them.
@ James Gibbons
Are those hypotheses? Where is your evidence?
As is clear from McIntyres audits, the complete math of the hockeystick wasn’t even published, just the results, even now the source of the errorbars is unknown.
So the hockeystick was not science, it was hubris.
Science is: show your work.
Yes, I’ve heard this argument on and on and on. Doesn’t impress me. It’s almost like saying that there are metaphysical phenomena that science will never explain. Lubos Motl has a recent article which debunks that one much better than I do.
Almost, not quite. The problem with it is that it assumes that there are more “knowledges” than one, and then goes on to conclude that there are more knowledges than one. It’s tautological. Now I have this activity which I will call “philosophy” in which I declare that I can base all science with the philosophical “achievements”, and without it, science “doesn’t exist”, and these philosophical achievements are qualitatively different from science in an absolute fashion.
Well such is not the case. Most ancient philosophy is now on the realm of empirical science, mostly because it started with intuitions, then some basic logical reasonings over it, and then we got the chance to empirically test our thoughts over it and it became more and more concrete and less on the realm of armchair punditry.
So the idiocy of saying that “science doesn’t prove itself” is just bad sophistry. Science is not in the job of “proving” anything, it is in the job of accumulating knowledge, as intended by the enlightenment project (which is, in itself, an hypothesis, “is it possible to accumulate knowledge?”). What we call philosophy of science are intuitions, hypothesis, a collection of good and bad habits in that activity we call “science”. Sometimes, such hypothesis get so concrete we can actually make some scientific empirical tests on the activity itself.
Don’t get lost on the self-references, because that’s what knowledge also counts on. If you are on the job of creating “bases” for each “knowledge” like that simpletonic “Philosophy is the basis of science” (not theology? sure about that?), then what is the basis of Philosophy? It’s turtles all the way down, and sure, there is always the opportunistic theologian crackpot which will point this obviosity to you and then declare victory, for God is the ultimate Turtle.
I think that the basis for this asinine thougth, that “philosophy is the basis of science” is just very aesthetically pleasing, and that’s the only reason why it is adopted so much by so many people that didn’t thought it through enough.
It’s pleasing because it’s so tidy. We pack “Science” to that kind of “stuff” white coats do. And then there’s that other thingy, we pack it “Philosophy”, and it is in the job of ordering the white coats around, defining them into existence, just like armchair gods.
It’s just so wrong on so many levels. For instance, I have a challenge for you people who buy into this stuff. Can you tell me if scientific methodology is Science or Philosophy? And if you answer the second, are you telling me that we can not test wether if some methods are better than others? In other words, are you telling me that the methods science employs have no discernable empirical effect on its own efficiency and rigour?
Perhaps that challenge may open your eyes. I’ll not wait standing up though (Portuguese saying)
“Are those hypotheses? Where is your evidence?”
Special Relativity published in 1905.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Academic_career
Quote: “In 1921, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Because relativity was still considered somewhat controversial, it was officially bestowed for his explanation of the photoelectric effect.”
Fact: he was so far ahead of the field that they did treat him like an outsider, at least where it concerned Special Relativity.
Royal Society
Google: “royal society fraud” for some recent disagreements over global warming math.
Newton and Leibniz got into it over who invented calculus and the Royal Society took to calling Leibniz a fraud.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Mathematics
If one wants to look at the reliance of Science on Philosophy I think that Gödel’s incompleteness theorems have much to say about that reliance. While I’m not an expert on these things, I think this quote sums it up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel's_incompleteness_theorems#Minds_and_machines
Quote: “Hilary Putnam (1960) suggested that while Gödel’s theorems cannot be applied to humans, since they make mistakes and are therefore inconsistent, it may be applied to the human faculty of science or mathematics in general. If we are to assume that it is consistent, then either we cannot prove its consistency, or it cannot be represented by a Turing machine.”
If I’m reading this correctly, I think it is basically saying that you can’t prove anything if you create your results with a computer model (Turing machine).
There is also this quote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel's_incompleteness_theorems#Relationship_with_computability
“Stephen Cole Kleene (1943) presented a proof of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem using basic results of computability theory. One such result shows that the halting problem is unsolvable: there is no computer program that can correctly determine, given a program P as input, whether P eventually halts when run with some given input. Kleene showed that the existence of a complete effective theory of arithmetic with certain consistency properties would force the halting problem to be decidable, a contradiction.”
Sounds to me that you can’t really prove the correctness of any computer program without a contradiction.
Looks like the model builders are barking at the wind.
All this babble about philosophy is arrogant. You either get a result, or you don’t get a result. Unless all of the factors are accounted for which influence natural phenomena, it isn’t science. You don’t get science by considering one element of a subject. Yet physicists usually limit their analysis to one element, because all they want to do is produce mathematics. It’s like claiming to build an automobile while only the axle is evaluated.
There is a place for philosophy. It can increase understanding of basic reality. There are realities more basic than science–like what is reality and what is science. If science is producing knowledge, then it has to be a representation of something that objectively exists. No single point can represent complex, basic, objective reality which makes up natural phenomena.
Gary Novak
http://www.nov47.com
We Climate Change deniers, both liberal and conservative alike, absolutely agree with the United Nations scientific conclusion that CO2 s effects will most definitely be anything from barley negligible or noticeable, to unstoppable-life-ending warming. 24 years of failed IPCC predictions say this was nothing but needless panic fueled by greed and politics.
Real environmentalists are happy and relieved the emergency is over and how utterly foolish this CO2 environMENTALism will make us look for the history books.
Now we arrest the news editors for treason, for leading the country to war against a false enemy. If you still think voters will allow this insanity to continue, YOU are the new denier.
System Change, not climate change. Population control, not climate control.
Ryan with your references to:
”
people who, by training, experience, intellectual capability, etc. are better equipped to determine the likelihood that a given belief, which beliefs in the field in which they have undergone this training, experience, etc. is true or false and its likely degree of uncertainty. Such people might be called, for lack of a better word, “experts.â€
And the advice “If the doctor above tells me I need surgery”
You seem to have a touching faith in how these people gain their credibility.
I take it you have never had unecessary surgery by a doctor.
In other words you are telling us you devolve your critical faculties, not to someone else but to a person chosen by yet others.
How far are you prepared to go in abandoning any personal resposibility for what you say and do?
Worse still, what on earth persuades you to convince others that this is a sensible thing to do?
Rather than the poor example of Einstein, the more relevant one is Wegener and continental drift. He was rubbished for about 50 years by all the “respectable” geologists . He never did any university research on it and was disparagingly referred to as a weatherman, even though he had a PhD in astronomy but no geology qualifications. Even nowadays, many don’t give him the recognition he deserves because he didn’t have the correct mechanism.
There, science wasn’t self-correcting. It was only when the evidence was so overwhelming that change was forced. Russ Ballard went through university at the time of the change and commented that it was like a lightswitch.
If Einstein’s relativity were real science, science would have nothing to do with knowledge. Relativity conflicts with all other physics and knowledge. There has never been a trace of rationality to it. It’s like justifying greenhouse gasses. It’s only science because power mongers say so. Until science become more rational, frauds such as global warming will be uncorrectable.
The only explanation promoters of relativity can give is that Einstein correctly predicted light would bend around stars. Predicting is not the test of real science. Palm readers at carnivals do that. The reason why is shown by the real physics. Light bends around stars because they have an atmosphere, and light bends as the density of the medium changes. In other words, predicting is too simplistic and haphazard for science.
The real test of science is in its purpose–to increase knowledge. How well does the result relate to all surrounding realities. Over time, this is the only test science ultimately goes by.
Meme Mine: “Population control, not climate control”
So you might like Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren? The new Eugenics. Taught “Ecoscience” textbook to UC Berkeley students, now likely running government departments like the EPA.
http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/
This guy is full of it. And they call conservatives Nazis!
Gary: Ever hear of gravitational lensing. Same thing only whole galaxies doing the light bending. They see many examples of it with the Hubble. And no it isn’t caused by gas clouds around the galaxy.
That and the equivalence of mass and energy that explains atom bombs and the Sun’s furnace are only several components of special relativity. When I was a child I had such difficulties understanding relativity. It takes years of physics before you can even begin to comprehend all the details and how they affect other area of studies, both telescopic and microscopic. K to 12 science is not fully explained and is a very watered down version of the real thing.
ChrisM: You seem to have hit one of the issues with the climate debate. That is, they tend to ignore people from other fields that have the ability to see through most of the analysis to find real errors. Some times one with exterior knowledge can find such things.
A hero of mine is J Harlin Bretz who documented the Spokane Floods after the last ice age. They were covered on PBS Nova a few years ago. I’ve actually walked into a canyon near Walla Walla laid down by the mud layers when I was a kid. The east coast geologists and others around the world just couldn’t get into cataclysms and dismissed it. Another recent similar flood is covered in “Noah’s Flood” by William Ryan and Walter Pitman.
James Gibbons,
Your trite explanation is no different than that of the climate change bunch. It’s no explanation at all. Gravitational lensing is based upon a mathematical model which interchanges the components of time and space with gravity. There is no validity based on laws of nature for such assumptions.
Mathematical models don’t create relativity any more than they great global warming. Science consists of measurements, not mathematical conjecture. The same differential densities create galaxy lensing as star lensing. But more than anything, math alone is not science.
Consider all of the arguments “deniers†have been making for the non-science of computer models for climate change. Relativity is even more of a mathematical fraud than climate change.
Gary Novak
Gary Novak,
I know what you mean. I gave up on gravity more than a year ago, and, since then, have been living a light-hearted, carefree existence.
Gary, your irony is silly, very funny. Yet it doesn’t work. When you say that science consists of “measurements”, you should know damned well that relativity has been measured very consistently and persistently. And Einstein didn’t receive his nobel for relativity for it was still a little far fetched for the guys at Oslo to accept it, even 15 years later.
More importantly there is no political career feedback on relativity. Read Judith Curry opening remarks from the last even at Purdue with Revkin and Pielke Jr. It’s in her blog (google it).
Along with an improper methodology for science, as shown with relativity and climate change, there is always an improper method of communication. Otherwise, the truth would prevail. At the extremes, we see personal attack; but more common is simply making claims without explanation. Physicists pretend that their subject matter is just too complex for the rest of us. Bull roar. If they can’t explain it, it isn’t fact. There is nothing in science that can’t be explained at least to other scientists. If it can’t be explained, it isn’t a natural phenomenon. There is no justification (or validity) in communication for making claims without enough explanation and clarification to get to the truth of the subject. That goes for science as well as everything else.
This is a moral principle. Christ said to look and listen to acquire understanding and judge for ourselves what is right (Mat 7:8, 13:16, 15:10)(Mark 4:13, 7:14, 8:18)(Luke 8:18, 10:23,24, 12:54-57, 24:45)(John 7:24, 8:43). He was called the teacher. A teacher gives people the information necessary for making their own judgments. No place else is this standard promoted or adhered to beyond the rudimentary and inescapable purpose of proper education, which seems to be close to disappearing. All authorities pretend that only they can understand a subject adequately, and the rest of us are just supposed to take their word for it. Nothing but fraud comes out of that standard.