It has become more and more popular over the last couple of decades to quote scientific facts and research just to make a point. There is nothing wrong with the idea of seeking objective truth through systematic examination and observation. The problem begins when we start confusing the narrative of science with actual scientific enquiry.
Doing science has always been a challenging task because it involves meticulous and repetitive actions in order to understand how something in this world works. The scientific method is a very specific ritual that involves systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the thereafter formulation, repetitive testing, and modification of hypotheses.
In this time and age, unless one is bound to engineering, the scientific process rarely applies. More and more experiments fail to replicate and this is true across all fields. The situation is even more dangerous to fields that impact us directly like in the case of medicine, sociology and psychology where studies are rarely replicable and many practices that affect millions of lives are rarely questioned.
Perhaps the most prominent use of the “authority” of science is when it comes to debates. People defending a position always know how to google a research that favors their point of view but rarely care to reference a similar research that contradicts it. Even worse, the so-called research is more than often a cheap click-bait summary that has nothing to do with the original research.
In this way people have become more and more accustomed to used words like “fact” and “proof” as if science proves anything. Science never proves anything. Science demonstrates something under specific premises that falls under an even more specific timeline. What is demonstrable today might not be next year. Most likely every single fact you know today about specific topics will be debunked in the next decade. For example we might know that today there is no scientific evidence that demonstrates that e-cigarettes, GMO's, electromagnetic fields from cellphones and wifi's or modern vaccines cause any harm but this was also true about cigarettes and radiation just a century ago.
The word science is being used today much like religion in order to demonstrate moral and factual absolutism about how things should be. The matter of fact is that most industries and professions that claim to be bounded by science are not. They rather use the word as a meme for credibility. Whether we talk about psychologists, doctors, sociologists, marketers, chiropractors, financial analysts, life coaches, alternative medicine and many, many others they are all mostly bullshiters who nitpick specific truths to sell their product. Most jobs that exist today will be a joke in 100 years from now because simply they fail to even address basic statistical correlation in their core practical foundation. They have stuck around because people have incorporate them into their lives and have found some sort of usefulness—not because they are demonstrably true.
The education system might be the core problem for this situation. During the first 15 years humans shouldn't be taught any subjects about how other humans have experienced this world. I mean nothing. Zero subjects. Children should only be taught how to think and not what to think. Right after the young padwans should teach their masters, not the other way around. There are rarely any "facts" around us. What exists as reality is mostly one facet of a truth — one shade we get to glimpse temporality until even that becomes obsolete.
The reason the Renaissance and Enlightenment had such a massive impact on the world, was because people decided to challenge everything they used to know about their world. This is how we came to make a revolution in knowledge and discovery. Same thing that worked in the classical world was applied anew.
Today we have become too complacent with our scientific state of enquiry. Even if our engineering ability slowly surges forward, we are merely making more and more toys based on more or less the same old principles. Scientists don't spend their life savings to invent or make something extraordinary like back in the day. Scientists today wait for a grant to be approved so they can stretch their post-doc and assistant professor crapmanship for the next 3-4 years—publishing useless papers or catering to intellectual tourists.
Invoking science should be done very carefully and delicately and only under premises that allow other scientific findings to be presented. Science is first and foremost a tool, not an end to itself. It cannot be used as a handicap to an online argument, formulate social policy or dictate how we should treat another human being. Much like everything else in life, the issue is never about the word or concept itself but about how we all choose to use it. We live in a world of abundance in regards to everything. Critical thinking can give us more answers than any set of scientific facts ever will.
