Does Science have a God? Surprisingly, it does

Why we need a reform of Science.

Is science (or “scientism”) a kind of religion? It is an idea that’s becoming common nowadays, but most people would object that science is not a religion because it doesn’t assume the existence of God — in fact, it explicitly rejects it. But, recently, I had a flash of sudden understanding. Scientism does have a God. It is just not called God, but it has the same characteristics as God (or Gods) in religions. It is the otherworldly entity called the “Scientific Method,” much mentioned but rarely understood.

One of the things that surprised me when I started my career in research was that the rules of the game were never laid out in clear. As a student in chemistry, I was taught extensively about the properties of atoms and molecules, bet very little about the process of scientific research. From what I could understand from my textbooks, scientific discovery was mainly a question of flashes of genius on the part of larger-than-life figures, from Galileo to Einstein. I knew that such a thing as “epistemology” existed, but that term was never mentioned in the classes I attended, and the philosophical questions involved had a vague flavor of things for sissies. A true scientist was supposed to be someone who makes experiments in a lab. Not for nothing, my teachers made a point of wearing a white lab coat all the time. (that’s not common anymore).

So, I went through my career following a simple strategy that I could describe as “monkey sees, monkey does,” that is, I would do what my colleagues were doing. I had to pass exams, find results, publish papers, gain “career points,” and progress in the academic pecking order. I couldn’t waste my time on philosophical matters. I started my career as a crystallographer, and when you analyze the structure of a solid, then either you find the right one or your computations produce just random noise. That’s the way science is supposed to work. Hadn’t Galileo shown that by dropping two balls from the top of the Pisa Tower? It was a simple experiment destined to prove that bodies fall at the same speed, independently of their weight. The experiment proved it (or did it?).

Galileo’s experiment with two balls dropped from the Pisa Tower, as shown in standard textbooks. Beautiful in theory, but with substantial problems. The first is that Galileo probably never performed it. The second is that it had been done by others before him. The third is that it demonstrated something that was already known.

Over the years, I left the kind of chemistry where you work in a lab to move to other fields. I discovered that the concept of the “scientific method” could vary a lot, especially if you leave the core of the “hard” sciences, such as physics and chemistry. I dabbled a little in molecular biology, and I stumbled into the concept that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of natural selection.” It is a statement that has its basis in Darwin’s theory of evolution. Science, sure, but read “The Origin of Species,” and you’ll find no trace of the Galilean experimental method in it (surely, Darwin didn’t drop his finches from the top of a tall tower). Still today, Darwin’s ideas are accused of being “not science” because the speciation of large organisms by evolution cannot be reproduced in a laboratory. Can you do experiments on a live Tyrannosaurus Rex?

In time, I moved to the fascinating field of modeling complex systems, another kettle of equations. You can’t do laboratory experiments on such things as oil production, ecosystems, Earth’s climate, or medicine. And yet, chemistry and system science are supposed to be two facets of the same bright jewel called “Science.” How can that be? What makes science the same thing as “truth”?

I am not the only one who noted how science (or “scientism”) is much closer to a religion than most scientists would care to note. The parallels are unmistakable: among other things, religions are epistemic tools used to explain the world, and science does the same. But most scientists won’t agree on this point, actually being quite sanguine on denying that science has anything to do with God, Gods, or similar naive superstitions. Science, they will say, is based on the scientific method that guarantees the truth of what science says.

You see how the “scientific method” has precisely the same place that God has in religion. Both are abstract entities supposed to speak the truth, but not directly. Rather, truth is relayed to commoners by a class of interpreters (“priests” or “scientists”) who can tell what God/Science says about a certain matter on the basis of an established canon of documentation called the “scriptures” in religion and the “scientific literature” in science. The scientific method has all the characteristics of God, except that it doesn’t have a long white beard nor lives in the sky.

A good example of how science and religion can go in parallel is the 1972 study “The Limits to Growth,” which examined the evolution of the world’s economic system. Many people said that the study was “not science.” Why? Because you couldn’t apply the Galilean method to the world’s economy. Dropping from the top of the Pisa Tower a copy of the “Limits to Growth” book together with a textbook on neoclassical economics wouldn’t have helped much. The result was that distinguished economists took the role of theologians, judging the Limits to Growth on the basis of a canon of holy scriptures assumed to be the “Solow-Swan” model. Having ascertained that the results of the Limits to Growth study were in contrast with the accepted canon, the study was summarily rejected as heresy.

The problem is even worse in medicine, as it appeared stark clear with the COVID-19 epidemic. Do you remember when Tony Fauci publicly stated, “I represent Science?” He sounded like the Pope when he speaks “ex cathedra.” Fauci was just one of the many white-haired scientists who went on TV to proclaim that whatever they said was true because it was based on “science,” sometimes specifying that it was guaranteed by the scientific method. But how exactly is the Galilean method applied in medicine? Surely not by dropping patients from the top of the Pisa Tower.

We all know that the “gold standard” of the scientific method in medicine is the “Randomized control trial” (RCT). The idea is to keep all the variables of the system constant while comparing the results for two different interventions on two groups of subjects. The members of the two groups are chosen (“randomized”) in such a way as to make sure that the two groups are as similar as possible. For a sufficiently large number of subjects, statistical tests can tell you whether the difference in the outcome for the two groups is significant or it is just random noise. Fine, when it works. But in most cases, the problems involved are enormous.

In some cases, performing an RCT test is just impossible. Think of the nationwide lockdowns enacted to contain the COVID-19 epidemic. How do you know if they were effective when you cannot create a randomized control group? The best you could do is compare different countries, for instance, Sweden (where lockdowns were not mandated) and Italy (where they were). You find that the mortality was larger in Italy than in Sweden (3,238 per million inhabitants vs. 2587 according to Worldometer). Does that allow you to conclude that lockdowns are not only ineffective but counterproductive? No, because Italy and Sweden are two very different countries, and other reasons may have caused mortality to be higher in Italy. Even when you can perform an RCT test in medicine, the limitations are numerous. Think about COVID-19 vaccines. The RCT data indicate that vaccines may reduce your risk of death. But they tell you little or nothing about collateral risks. And how could you know whether vaccines could harm you in the long run? To know that, we’ll have to wait for the long run to come.

These are intrinsic problems with the very concept of “scientific method” when applied to areas where it just doesn’t fit. But things can be made much worse by all too human problems: not just incompetence, but also plain corruption. And here, unfortunately, the situation in science is awful for both problems. The latest scientific scandal is the retraction of a study that claimed that hearing aids reduced the risk of dementia in old people. Was it just incompetence? Maybe, but it is curious that it went in the direction that made manufacturers and marketers of hearing aids happy. And if this is what happens with hearing aids, can you imagine what could happen in fields where the pharmaceutical industry makes billions?

Don’t make me say something that I have no intention of saying. I am not saying that we should abandon the scientific method, nor that we should neglect data and evidence. I am saying that the “Galilean method” is not the proxy for a divine entity that always tells the truth. Used in this way, it is a false God, even an evil one.

Nobody should be allowed to use the scientific method as an excuse to increase their personal prestige or to make money. Nor should it be used to reject and demonize concepts and ideas that someone finds politically incorrect. We need a new kind of science, one that recognizes its limits and whose practitioners do not pretend to speak with divine authority. Is anyone ready to nail a sheet with 95 Theses on the door of the great church of Science?