IT IS SUCH a classic example of the limits of the abilities of science that the most fundamental statement of science as an unlimited entity cannot be sustained with science. That ideology, scientism, is based in the faith that what science cannot prove cannot be known by human beings, a statement which is, itself incapable of being proved by science. It would have to be false if it were true, so it can't be true. In the past I've given that statement as said by a man who should certainly have known better than to say it, the great mathematician and logician Bertrand Russell. He certainly was able to understand that the statement collapsed under the inability of his all-powerful oracle, science, to support the claim of its definitive decisiveness in what can be considered known which proved that the statement was false.
Every once in a while I go through a math or other textbook to see if I've still got it, I'm doing that right now and so far it would seem I've still got at least a college frosh level of algebra. At my age it's reassuring to find that out. It's a book that has a lot of basic set theory in it so evaluating statements as to whether they're true or false through their mathematical support is in my mind. But even that activity doesn't make much use of the idea that you should prefer a statement of truth over a false statement. Math, like science might be able to help you decide if something is true or false but it can't tell you why you should prefer the truth nor can it give you a reason to prefer truth over falsity, it obviously didn't inform Bertrand Russell as to why he should prefer the truth that science can't be the sole means of finding truth because the statement that it is the sole means of doing that that can't be demonstrated with science.
Science, as a method of finding reliable information about the physical world can be a very powerful means of finding information of superior reliability in those areas it can be practiced at any given time. But science, not even math is a stand-alone entity, both depend on a far broader range of human experience than either of them can contain, the idea that either of those is capable of being a totalizing or monistic system is sheer stupidity. The idea that either are an entity independent of human minds is as imaginary as Russell's orbiting teapot or almost everything that comes out of FOX Lies.
Science always has to be done within the limits of what can be observed, measured and honestly analyzed, when it strays far from that the chances of what is asserted by scientists being true falls as certainly as it does in any other field of human activity when objective verification can't be had. Science done without that quickly become nothing much but a series of ideological holdings as it so often does when there is an over extension outside of what can be effectively observed or measured or honestly analyzed, in my lifetime one of the most significant of those struggles surrounded the completely speculative neo-sciences of Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology in which the assertions of the ultra-Darwinists (as their opponent Stephen Jay Gould called them) could never be confirmed because no one can go back through the tens, scores, even hundreds of millions of years during which evolution happened to trace the persistence of "traits" alleged to have survived into the most distantly related species, everything from ants to human beings and even more distant ones. It is impossible to even identify such proposed shared "traits" as being the same thing in the species which supposedly share them. It's impossible to tease out whether or not many of the "traits," especially those invovling alleged behaviors are really there or if they are imagined to be in one or both of the speices by a scientist motivated to see what they want to. That last thing is something which is ubiqitous in the supposedly scientific study of "behavior" and other aspects of mental activity, especially likely when one or more of the species is inarticulate and can't report on the internal experience of that "behavior" or mental activity. In fact, even when the organism can articulate that it only adds a whole host of other problems. If, as is so often done, the behavioral scientist uses college students as their subjects, many of whom may well have some idea of what the study might want to be there. I had an aquaintance who annoyed his psychology prof by pointing out that many of the studies they discussed in the class he was taking were done on Yale students who couldn't comprise a legitimate sample of the human population, at that time they were uniformly males, just as one of the problems with the validity of it.
Another thing I do once in a while is look at the latest postings on the very active blog Retraction Watch, one of the few blogs which doesn't seem to have suffered much of a fall off in current and sometimes very hot new content and which doesn't seem to ever lack for informed, interested and insightful readers. While quite a bit of the stuff that gets retracted is done so through honest mistakes, much of it is a result of clear and obvious fraud and fraud which becomes quite obvious once there has been what there should have been before it was published, rigorous review of the methodology and substance of the study or experiment which was retracted. Quite a bit of that right now concerns obvious fraud involving the dishonest use of photographs and images which could not have been used by those publishing the paper without their intending to commit fraud, TO LIE, IN PLAIN ENGLISH.
As well as being a methodology, an ideology and even an atheist substitute for religion, science is a profession, one which in a professional or academic context carries enormous financial and professional motives to publish something, anything, academia tying advancement and even retaining a professional engagement on the requirement that you publish, no matter whether or not it is legitimate or even honest. There are a whole host of professional practices that will add to the professional record of an academician, publishing supposedly original work (plagiarism and copying are also covered by Retraction Watch), acting as a peer reviewer, being involved with a professional journal, etc. And that's on top of everything else a scientist is supposed to do to get and retain a job and, they hope, advance in the profession. One of the greatest scandals of the recent spate of scandals in science is the grotesque laxity of what so-called "reviewers" review so as to get their colleagues published. I've mentioned before that during the Marc Hauser scandal I asked a biologist friend of mine how his reviewers could have failed to look at the videos of the "behavior" he was describing, what proved that he had lied about what his very influential papers claimed he was seeing in the lab. She told me that reviewers never look at that kind of thing, they take it on faith that their colleagues are being honest about that kind of thing, they just look to see if the reported results are in line with the claims made about what they saw. Clearly that faith would often fail the truth test if it were tested in line with what scientific method is claimed to be.
In the brawls I got a on many a Scienceblog and many a play-lefty blog frequented by scientistic materialist-atheists, I was decreasingly surprised to find out the extent to which honesty was beside the point when discussing science or anything else with them. I can't say that my former assumption that atheists don't lie more than the general population survived the new atheism, my experience of arguing with so many of them wouldn't support the idea that they especially value the truth, especially among the true believers in science as an ideology, their ideology, their religion. That was true whether the atheist was a scientist or mathematician who allegedly valued science for its method which is alleged to be a heightened method for discerning the truth, I never found they had an especially well developed passion for the truth no matter where it lay, especially when it could be demonstrated to lie somewhere other than where they wanted it to. In that they are not especially different from the general run of human beings. The difference is that they claim to be better than that by virtue of their higher sciencyness. In that they are no better than the frequently encountered whited supulchers of conventional religiosity. In the age of Trump and the pseudo-Christianity of his fascists, no one could honestly go through this exercise without mentioning them. Perhaps the fact that religion and its methods can discern that it is a sin to tell a lie makes the religious liar more wicked than the scientific one, though they'd certainly pretend that they were better than them. To me a liar is a liar, especially when what they lie about is so dangerously consequential. One of the recent listings on Retraction Blog was a paper alleging that there were serious health problems from taking Covid vaccinations. In that the two kinds of lying intersect at a mountain of corpses from those who bought into fatal lies. The ground for that was set in the scientific fraud of a British doctor who got published in the Lancet, one of the most prestigious of all science publications, one whose paper was retracted but well after it set off a horrific and deadly superstition and cult which is entirely relevant to the Ivermectin cult. And it has far reaching consequences, I recently found out that one of my relatives needed to be treated with Ivermectin and had trouble getting it as a consequence of its use by the anti-vaxx, Trump chumps. He had to climb through extra hoops to get it for one of its licensed uses in the United States.
Science, to be any good at all, depends on what it cannot generate but which is properly a religious holding, that you should tell the truth and you shouldn't lie. It's not much use without that.
