(Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash)
(Originally published in The Royal Society of Victoria’s Newsletter, February 2022 issue, page 5)
The current COVID 19 pandemic has brought forth the “science vs belief” dichotomy in many quarters. This phenomenon is nothing new; there have always been differences in the frames of reference that people use to base their decisions. What is new, however, is the fervour with which some of these beliefs are held and used to debate scientific evidence. The root cause of this fervour has, in my modest opinion, much less obvious origins.
Science tells us what the world is like. It tells us what the world is made of, and what something is or isn’t. Science allows us to explore the questions and hypotheses we design by continuous questioning of the universe and everything in it. In its very essence, importantly, science is an impersonal, amoral process where only the method and the evidence reign supreme, and often against the people’s and the researchers’ morals, feelings and desires. Science is, therefore and philosophically speaking, about an is and not about an ought. There is no way of deriving an ought from an is, and to do so people must engage their own set of morals and values first; set which is often hidden away, subconscious, especially to those who claim that it is possible to derive and ought from an is. In the context of the pandemic, by way of an example, science can tell us how the virus replicates and what is the level of effectiveness of certain measures to stop contagion. Science does not tell us however to what degree those measures should be put in place, often in contradiction with one another and sometimes in direct opposition to some moral values societies hold sacred. Science can tell us how to minimise the number of lives lost due to the virus, but it does not tell us what the value of human life is in the complex context of modern human life, or how we should weigh the value of human life with, for example, the value of freedom, or with the value of being able to see your dying parents, or to worship in your church and practice a religion in community. These and many others are moral questions, and people hiding behind data, scientific consensus and health advice to make policy decisions are guilty of framing a moral question as a scientific one.
This is where the problem begins. Motivated by fear and anxiety – and maybe even by political expediency and hunger for power –, people have turned a blind eye to how science works. In a desperate attempt to curb public opinion to act on these pressing matters, people have made science a belief in itself; a religion in which scientific data, consensuses and other forms of knowledge of how things “are” are held as holy scriptures beyond questioning and beyond dissent. This belief, unironically called “The ScienceTM” in some internet circles, demands submission and following, rather than questioning and dissent. And a belief, no matter the foundations, is commonly fought against with another belief, especially when the former is used as a scapegoat to impose mandates and do away with the perceived sacredness of other frames of reference, such as the civil rights of people in modern liberal democracies, or is used as an excuse to justify that certain people need to lose their jobs, businesses, income, profits and other forms of livelihood in the name of progress, health, the planet or some other “greater good”. This new “religion of science” that demands subordination to the scientific consensus in the name of the greater good, sometimes espoused by scientists themselves, just adds to the ongoing problem of political polarisation where people are unable to find common ground and compromise on the problems of modern societies, and this inability often devolves into displays of power and authoritarianism, now being “backed up” by the work scientists around the world do on many fronts of inquiry.
But this is not how science works; or at least not how it should work. Science asserts itself from the authority of the evidence, not from the authoritarianism of those wielding the evidence – often incomplete and out of context. Science welcomes dissent, questions, scrutiny and concerns, rather than pushing them away or dismissing them out of hand with vulgar displays of intellectual classism, common of the tribal human brain. Science should be open, transparent, welcoming of dissenters and their questions, rather than being held as a collection of sacred writings and dogmas to be used to “educate” the minds of those who hold often valid concerns and alternative hypotheses, solutions or morals. Science is a process of discovering truth that overwrites itself over and over the more we develop technologies and expand our horizons, not a system to produce ironclad pieces of information used to justify moral decisions or to keep thinking minds in line. And the more people hold science as a religion – with scientific journals as their holy scriptures – rather than as the ongoing, transparent and evolving process of truth-seeking that science is, the more we invariably ask others to oppose this “belief in science” with a belief of their own, unfounded as it may be, because that is the very nature of human beings: we are not rational beings; we are not, in the immortal words of Fyodor Dostoevsky, “piano keys” to be played by the rules of mathematics, science, policy, or any “greater good”.
It would be preposterous of me to say that I hold the answer to this problem, which rather than being one of scientific nature is one of bread-breaking and authoritarian nature. Thus, I offer my humble opinion only as a first step for engagement and further discussion by way of a diagnosis. The problem in my view is not one of evidence, data, or even of beliefs, but one of tribalism and incapacity to communicate, compromise and find common-ground solutions between people. On the one side, those who weaponise science and its authority to further their political causes. On the other, people who, overwhelmed by the authority that science carries with it, turn to their own confirmation biases and supply them with the dissenting voices in science that will never cease to exist, and point to the inconsistencies and issues that science, by virtue of its nature, will always carry. I would dare say that those in the latter group do not however turn to their confirmation biases, beliefs and dissenting voices by virtue of an oft alleged incapacity to understand science, reasoning and logic –these are people as smart as any other –, but by simple reaction and resistance to the science-backed mandates that others impose on them; mandates that tell them how they should live their lives and what decisions they should make to be as morally righteous as those who hide their morals behind the banner and authority of scientific endeavour.
People of all walks of life, no matter how dissenting or uninformed their opinions are, need to be listened to, not dismissed or censored. They need to be accounted for politically, not ignored or demonised. They need to be held in intellectual respect, not in intellectual contempt. And we need to recognise that science is not a moral guide to make decisions, but rather a system to evaluate the outcome of our decisions. Only then, maybe, we will be able to sit together and find common-ground solutions to the most pressing issues we all face as a society. We need as many on board as possible, after all. And we need people to trust science, not hold it in the justified doubt that grows out of using it as an authoritarian rule-making playbook to try to solve complex, often unsolvable problems. More transparency, communication, responding to concerns, and complex intellectual and moral conversations rather than fearmongering, authoritarianism, slogans, and moral and intellectual dismissal. This, I believe, is the core of the problem, and the main roadblock to build the trust that science needs to work effectively at a social level.