You don’t question science without valid scientific data and theories

Here I would like to resume, for the readers of this page, a recent, very brief argument of mine, in response to certain serial doubters who believe they can criticize the theories of the scientific community, simply by asserting that they must be doubted, and equating the doubt that a theory is false to the generic doubt that a scientific position, when it is truly such, is always better than one that lacks the characteristics of methodfactual evidence and internal consistency typical of the researchers’ claims.

This kind of confusion arises because many people, when they cannot find arguments to support their favorite ideas about the validity of some scientific claim, resort to an argument that comes up often: that of the duty of doubt on the part of scientistswhich is invoked to say that those who defend Darwinism or anthropogenic climate change would not have a scientific position because they would not question their own claims.

Since the time of Socrates, doubt has been recognized as a privileged epistemic position; it is the only way to guarantee the progress of knowledge. Any self-described scientist knows that a single well-documented counterfactual can kill the best theory.

Actually, every scientist’s dream is to find a fact that challenges the established limits of scientific knowledge and to set your sights on something new and unknown. The larger the part of the scientific building affected by that new, unique and well-documented fact, the more important it is to discover it and the more likely it is to find something truly revolutionary.

However, the generic doubt that some of our knowledge needs to be reinterpreted, falsified or integrated is not enough: it is really necessary to find something wrong – a hole in our understanding – to arrive at an interesting doubt instead of a trivial and generic statement about the impermanence of what we know.

Instead, it is a pathetic ploy of science deniers to argue that current scientific knowledge is provisional, without proposing anything better, to deny both the epistemic value of science and the prescriptions that derive from knowledge.

The knowledge produced by modern science is secure not because of the information it provides, but because of the method used to produce it. Therefore, anyone who wants to attack that knowledge must use the same method, or his argument will be irrelevant.

If you are not convinced of abiogenesis, propose an alternative hypothesis that is testable.

If you feel that Darwinism is insufficiently proven, then you present evidence that contradicts the mountains of published data and can be organized into a new model of science that also explains all that Darwinism explains.

If you don’t accept the idea that the extreme complexity of living beings derives from elementary and very well described processes, which although they cannot be reconstructed for the particular case of any living organism today, are necessary and sufficient to explain the existence of any organism; then you have to formulate a better theory or bring a test description to test it.

Doubt, as a general state aimed at verifying what we believe to be true, is the driving force of science, but doubt must translate into a verification project to be productive.

Not only that, but what is often forgotten is that doubt should be used to test one’s distrust of scientific claims before doubting the claims themselves. This is a humility that is lacking in many, who instead demand humility from their adversaries.

Doubt everything, sure. But first of all doubting one’s doubts and one’s competence in dealing with a given issue, and then examining one’s doubts to identify the method that is needed to bring them to a solution, so that they prove to be founded or that, conversely, they dissolve with respect to the scientific thesis attached.

Post Scriptum. The unreasonable doubt referred to here, used to combat science, is an alternative but equivalent version of the incompleteness argument. This goes something like this: Since every piece of our scientific knowledge is incomplete, it follows that we should wait before accepting scientific knowledge. The answer to such a position is the same as we have already discussed: who believes that a theory is so complete as to be useless or too fragile, brings data and theories, to build models of the world of equal explanatory value to what is being criticizedor at least suggest a way to test the idea that the incompleteness of a particular area of ​​knowledge precludes its usefulness.