Science isn’t always hard

One thing many people fail to realize when criticizing science, is that not all science is in a laboratory with test tubes, chemicals, and geeky glasses.

Science is a method of investigation, one based upon empirical trial and error. In the most simplistic form science involves creating a hypothesis for some problem or unknown phenomenon, extrapolating a new result from this hypothesis and testing that result.

Typically, people think of this in terms of physics, chemistry, and biology. However, these constitute only the “hard” sciences, whereas there are many other fields of study that rely on the scientific method, such as psychology, archeology, sociology, economics, etc. These are often referred to as the “soft” sciences.

So a criticism often arises that there are many things that science cannot explain properly, for example, in Would You Believe?, liberal Christian scholar Tom Harpur describes how science could tell us the chemical makeup and process involved in causing tears, however science falls short in explaining the true meaning behind a tear. However, a field like psychology can explain why a person would shed a tear, in a form more useful than the pH and saline concentrations that chemistry may provide.

It may be a fact that “science cannot know everything” but I have yet to see a demonstration of why this is the case. As of this writing, the scientific method is the only available method of attaining knowledge that has repeatably produced results that are not in direct contradiction with the world around us.

My final comment here is for the hard scientists reading, who will immediately recognize that oftentimes the methodology of many soft sciences is not up to par. And this is true, psychology especially has been fraught with pseudo-scientific claims and weak control of variables. However, every scientific discipline today went through it’s own weak learning period, and hopefully as we progress these soft disciplines will tighten their own standards.