Scientific Statements

Science is the practice of acquiring knowledge through testing hypotheses through experimentation, recording observations, and drawing conclusions. 

Truly science-based statements are rare for a few reasons. 

One is that the scientific process is carried out by human beings. And, because of Original Sin, the human intellect is darkened. We do not see the world as it truly is, and we do not practice integrity when performing scientific experiments and forming conclusions. We conduct scientific investigation with the veils of self-interest, tribalism, and confirmation bias over our eyes. 

A truly science-based statement is a conclusion directly based upon real observation, using terms that are clearly defined and testable. More often, the "science-based" statements we see are instead the personal preferences and biased conclusions of the speaker. 

Take a recent email I received from Virginia Senator Mark Warner (D), assuring me that "These vaccines are extremely safe." Or the billboard on the highway, along with vaccines.gov, proclaiming that the Covid-19 vaccine is "safe and effective." 

These are not scientific statements. They are not based on real observations. They use undefined terms that cannot be verified scientifically. What does "extremely safe" mean? 

A scientific statement would say "We have not observed serious, lingering adverse side effects over one year, across clinical trials of 44,000 people and 4.28 billion administered doses."

The observations necessary to declare a treatment "safe" do not exist when that treatment is less than 16 months old, and human life expectancy is greater than 16 months post vaccination. The damaging health effects of DDT, asbestos, thalidomide, PCBs, Vioxx, feeding infants formula over breastmilk, and over-prescription of antibiotics took years to become widely recognized. 

As a College Genetics professor of mine told us starry eyed environmentalists: you can never prove that something is safe. You can only list the effects you have and have not observed, the limitations of those observations, and the likelihood of additional effects based on prior observations of similar objects.

Far from blocking the progress of science, a theology preaching absolute moral standards demands that scientific experimentation and publications be done with integrity. Sound theology also demands that we appreciate real limits on what can and cannot be proven by empirical science broadly, and by specific experiments and individuals on the ground. 

And be aware that, as science itself verifies, not all published scientific conclusions are valid and reproducible: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/05/scientific-regress. 

The [2015 Open Science Collaboration] OSC was the biggest attempt yet to check a field’s results, and the most shocking. In many cases, they had used original experimental materials, and sometimes even performed the experiments under the guidance of the original researchers. Of the studies that had originally reported positive results, an astonishing 65 percent failed to show statistical significance on replication, and many of the remainder showed greatly reduced effect sizes.