Science is Like God
Feb 6th, 2008 by Micah Tillman | 3 Comments |
From a person in an advertisement for a show on truTV:
People lie. Science doesn’t.
Do I have to say what’s wrong with that attitude? Try this one instead:
People lie. God doesn’t.
No, no. Wait. This one is a classic (I saw it on a bumper sticker so long ago):
God said it. I believe it. That settles it.
What’s wrong with one is what’s wrong with the others.
Perhaps science doesn’t lie in the sense that “science” is not a person, and therefore has no capacity to lie. But by the same token, science has no capacity to tell the truth. It’s a tool, not a sentient being.
People, on the other hand, can lie about science.
On the other hand, I think there’s something to that sentence which doesn’t apply to your rebuttals. I’m sure all of us have heard “figures don’t lie, but liars figure” or “there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” What has always struck me about such statements is that while people can misrepresent statistics as much as they like, a statistician will catch them out. It is far, far harder to lie using numbers than it is to lie any other way. Experimental results are (ideally) replicable. (Okay, we all have an obvious example of a statistical sample which is not replicable, i.e. exit polls, and similar historical examples where the results must have been recorded at a particular time and place. In those cases, a dishonest researcher can report false results and perhaps get away with it.)
While people can lie about science and statistics and all of that, it’s much, much harder than it is to lie about anything else. By the by, it is my opinion that when people misread statistics to support their own case, it is most often a result of confirmation bias and statistical ignorance (yes, even among people who should know better, like medical researchers), rather than outright fraud.
The thing that jumps out at me is that both Science and God are represented by people. We must take the word of people called scientists for what science says, and scientist have been caught making errrors and actually lying. Likewise, we must take the word of people for what God says, and religious people have been caught making errors and actually lying, too.