Dr. Fauci, the Scientific Method, and the Ten Commandments

0:01 when you hear people say the science is settled or trust the science like what goes through your minds as lifelong scientists drives me baddy yeah it couldn't possibly be a greater betrayal of the Core Essence of scientific thinking and the way to see that is to think about the following puzzle it must be true that every Transcendent idea starts as a minority

0:34 of one right to the extent that an idea arises somewhere and then takes over civilization and then ultimately we all go on to accept it it had to start with somebody who was not in agreement with everybody else so if you have some rule that says oh what everybody else agrees on right even all the degreed people you know all the experts in uh geology once thought that the Earth was a young place and you know took it took ly to open

1:02 this door and now we all understand that the story of the earth is not that and so anyway the the idea is if you are if you are one of those people who believes in the science then you are freezing our level of knowledge where it is you are preventing progress by deciding that anybody who's out of step is wrong and um if you understand what role science played in getting getting us to the achievements that we have to our credit

1:33 then how dare you you you can't take that from us we are entitled and that means you have to leave The Fringe most of the people on The Fringe are going to be wrong that's true but on that Fringe amongst all those wrong people are the ideas that we will all ultimately accept because it will be transparently obvious that they are right right but it's not obvious now so if you like progress um that that is a principle that needs to

1:59 be removed from from discourse because it has no place I would say one more thing um which is many who speak of the science the science is settled follow the science uh think of themselves as secular and the science that they are talking about is not actually science but it is filling a religion shaped hole it is it is doing exactly the thing that

2:29 these people who claim that they are not religious uh what religion is would be doing for them if they understood that instead of believing in a god they are believing in a Thing Called science and given the way they're describing it they don't know what science is it is you know it's it's far more frail and dangerous than any religion really would be because it's a fiction uh that the people who actually are doing real science s can point at

3:01 and say but that's not the thing you're not you're you don't understand the thing you've exalted something to the level of authority unquestioning authority that patently doesn't exist and actually has there is not even any Scripture here you know there are no texts that we can refer to with regard to the science being settled that that are reliable in the way that you know even we talk about the founding documents of America The Ten Commandments may be outdated but

3:32 they still hold truths right there is nothing behind the science that the people who would follow the science have because that is an entire fiction and actually if you think about this episode where fouchi says that to criticize him is to criticize science there is no scientific Ten Commandments but if you think about what the Ten Commandments are constructed to prevent the prohibition against taking the lord's name in vain speaking on

4:02 behalf of the Lord this is somebody who ostensibly represents science who is violating its most fundamental principle which is that everything is falsifiable right he is he is violating science in order to claim its mantle and uh we should have detected right then that this person if if there was anything that we could lean on as you know science that you know was so secure

4:33 that it was worth us all believing in it it certainly wasn't the guy who was declaring himself science because that's the opposite I I am reminded of a book I read um I want to say five or six years ago but that was published in the 90s by Jonathan Rous called the kindly inquisitors are you familiar with this book um I am it's been a while but yeah he he defines and I might not be able to

4:58 perfectly remember this but had three pillars of what he called liberal science and among them was there is no final Authority you know you there is no such Authority is actually a deeply unscientific premise there is nothing about science that constitutes their being Authority there is no final Supreme Court you get to go to and say will you make the final determination for me guys and gals and robes it's like

5:28 nope it it'll be true until we find that Black Swan or discover that weird thing where wow sometimes you sometimes particles can become waves and all kinds of other crazy stuff that is false until it's until it's found out to be true um I used to say to my students science is not Democratic and this struck them is impossible but we love science and we love democracy how can they not be combined and they're different I do want

5:55 to rescue though the idea of authority there is no final Authority absolutely not and there's nothing in science that is so secure that it couldn't be upended by Superior evidence but there is there it's not that we can't pay attention to anybody but the point is the authority that you have in science is earned it is earned by being preent it is earned by having predictive power right so there is Authority but it's provisional and all

6:27 of the people who we would once have considered authorities because the Insight that they brought did have tremendous predictive power they were still working with models and those models get better over time right but you know new Newton wasn't a fool because he believed something that we now know to be false he was a genius even though what he presented was a model that was extremely useful within limited bounds right we still even teach

6:58 it even though we know that it's a model that is incomplete so anyway Authority exists but the point is it can be earned and it can be lost if you like this clip we've got more where that came from be sure to watch the full video and don't forget to subscribe to the channel so you won't miss our new videos as they come out each week