Faith is often commended as an alternative to science. Suppose it be asserted that prayer can promote a sick person’s recovery. Suppose then that many sick people are prayed for and they do not recover. Will that have any bearing on the truth of the assertion, according to its advocates? No, it will not. Advocates of faith will affirm the efficacy of prayer no matter what happens subsequent to any prayer or any number of prayers, under any circumstances, at any time, over any period of time.
In effect, what this means is that there is actually no difference between truth and falsehood in matters of faith. The faith advocate says: Prayer changes things. Very well, but what if it did not? No believer can answer that question. In the epistemology of faith, it is not even relevant.
So it is in general with answers offered outside of science. They tend to be incorrigible: Their advocates will acknowledge no way they could be proved wrong. They might not claim infallibility. They might say, ‘Of course we could be wrong.’ But ask them how they would know they were wrong — what evidence, if anyone produced it, would falsify their answers — and they usually retreat into evasion or obfuscation.
If they do not — if they say, ‘We would know we were wrong if we observed ____ under conditions of ____ ’ — then we’re at least moving toward a scientific answer. There is more to the scientific method than falsification, but a falsifiable answer is at least somewhat scientific.
Perhaps more to the point of this essay, I have observed that when people start carrying on about science not having all the answers, they invariably are trying to defend something unfalsifiable. What I hope to have demonstrated is the futility of entertaining such ideas. Outside the confines of scientific thinking, the difference between true and false seems to evaporate.
In its place we might sort answers by how they make us feel, or by whether we trust the people feeding them to us. Depending on the question, those considerations are not necessarily to be disregarded, but we should never forget that history’s most pernicious falsehoods made a lot of people feel good, and those people heard the falsehoods from people they trusted.
Answers can come from anywhere. Scientists themselves have gotten answers from dreams, scriptures, poetry, and just lucky guesses. The source of an idea is practically irrelevant to critical thought. Whatever matters is how the idea gets tested. Science is less about producing answers than about evaluating them. In no other system does the evaluation process insistently ask: If this answer were wrong, how would anyone know?
If we don’t know how something could be wrong, then it just does not mean anything for it to be true. That is why, although science does not have all the answers, it has the only useful answers.
