On the Scientific Method
People talk frequently of something being ‘scientific’ or of beliefs being ‘unscientific’. I want to examine the scientific process here.
Imagine a primitive country where nothing is known about technology, in the sense that we use it, and a person has developed a primitive thermometer. The experiment he wants to perform is probably the simplest one that can be devised: he wants to measure the boiling point of water. He has a hunch (a hypothesis in scientific parlance) that water reaches a certain temperature when heated and doesn’t get any hotter. He wants to know what that temperature is on his primitive thermometer. To do this he places the thermometer in a bowl of boiling water and marks off the position on the gauge. He repeats this a number of times in various locations and gets the same result. His hypothesis is now established into a theory. He lends the thermometer to a friend to perform the same experiment. His friend takes it to his house up a mountain but finds that the water boils at a different point on the thermometer. If these people were following a correct scientific process, they would attempt to find out what is different in the tests.
Now in reality every experiment is different in one way or another and what these experimenters have to do is to determine what the relevant differences are. Without any prior knowledge we have to make assumptions about what we think is relevant. One obvious difference here is that the experiment was performed by a different person, so our original experimenter could perform the experiment himself. Eventually they would find that performing the experiment at different altitudes gets different results, and so the original theory is not disproved but is refined. Later on someone may boil water at sea level and find they get a different result again. More experimentation may determine that the purity of the water is a factor, and so on. All the time we have to make assumptions about what is relevant to the experiment and what isn’t. Also, when someone gets a different result do we simply say they are wrong or do we attempt to find out what the differences are?
Even in this simple example we have to assume that the time of day, the phase of the moon, sunspot activity or the weather won’t affect the outcome. In reality, you can never know what is relevant or not without knowing the whole picture, and of course you never can know everything - and so we make assumptions. Nowadays few people follow the true scientific process. Previously accepted scientific theories are used as a basis for establishing new theories and cannot be questioned – they are assumed to be correct. In other words, not only have scientists determined what is or is not relevant, once an experiment has become established scientific ‘fact’ it can never be disproved, or, more specifically, cannot be refined. In our example when the experimenter determined that water boils at a particular temperature and found that this wasn’t true in all situations, the experiment wasn’t disproved it was simply refined.
In my previous blog (‘The Girl with the X-Ray Eyes’) I quoted Richard Wiseman as saying that if we were to accept such [paranormal] phenomena as being true; we would have to throw out all our current scientific theories. This is unscientific nonsense. Our current theories would still apply; it is simply that they would be refined to accommodate situations that are currently deemed to be irrelevant. Real science has stopped; instead what is considered scientific is what the body of scientists believe.
A comment often made about religion is that if we believe in God, then where does God come from? Well, it’s an assumption. The assumption is that the universe was created by God and he is present in our lives. (In future articles I will explain this in more detail and show that once this assumption has been made it can be verified). Now, compare this one assumption with this vast array of (often contradictory) assumptions that scientists make even in the simplest experiment.
In the example above the experimenter assumes that the thermometer is accurate but the accuracy of a thermometer is determined by testing against a known temperature, for example the temperature of boiling water.
This isn’t to say that science isn’t useful. It is a tool for a job. For some jobs (such as establishing the boiling point of water or working out the trajectory of a rocket) it is very useful; for other jobs, such as social science and psychology it can be useful but one has to be very careful as there are many factors beyond the control of the experimenter; and for some things, such as philosophy and theology, it is totally useless because of the assumptions that the scientist has to make. In tasks such as medicine there are so many variables that a totally different system of science is used (for example control groups use placebos when testing drugs). This is reported to be scientific but these methods are based on assumptions many of which are quite tenuous on close examination.
