We have always wanted to learn about our world. Humans are innately curious and this trait has contributed greatly to our success as a species. And figuring out how and why our world works, from, why does the sun rise and what causes disease, to, why do we dream and how can I build a bridge? For most of human history we’ve grappled with these and other questions with results that ranged from mildly incredible to spectacularly wrong.
Human systematic thinking didn’t start with lofty questions about thecosmos or the nature of existence. It started with accounting and geometry andsolving practical problems of tracking inventories and dividing land andfarmers fields. (This probably isn’t strictlytrue, the ealiest records we have are about inventories and accounting but even before there was writing there was experimentation and learning, look at the progression in technology of stone tools). For our purposes however we are dealing with history and these are some of the earliest writing samples we have:
“Barley: 350 bushelsstored in temple of Inanna” (Sumerian cuneiform tablets)
“Field of Enlil-bani: 6 fields, 18 furrows each” (Babylonian land surveys)
Why? Because when you’re running a temple and storing wine and grain forthe community you need to know how muchgrain, beer, bread, wine and other stuff each person contributes, whatallocation different people are permitted, what you are owed and what you owe.
Geometry emerged, we presume, from similar practical requirements: Surveyors on the Nile, for example, had to re-establish field boundaries after the Nile flooded every year. They developed techniques for creating perfect right angles, measuring irregular areas, and calculating volumes for grain storage.
As we observed our world we realized the same geometric principles thathelped survey fields also described the movements of celestial bodies. The samelogical thinking that tracked grain stores could be applied to understandingdisease patterns, predicting floods, or organizing legal codes.
With writing for the first time we could travel through time, knowledge wasn’t limited to what could be retained within 3 or 4 generations. And we started accumulating knowledge.
For most of human history there hasn’t been a distinction between, what we now call, religion, philosophy, natural philosophy, medicine, astronomy, engineering and practical knowledge. Ancient and medieval practitioners were often:
- Priest-astronomers, who studied celestial movements for both spiritual and practical calendar-making purposes (those grain harvests needed to be timed precisely)
- Philosopher-physicians who theorized about the nature of reality while also treating patients (and occasionally not killing them)
- Scholar-mystics who saw understanding the natural world as a path to understanding the divine
- Accountant-mathematicians who managed temple resources while developing increasingly sophisticated numerical systems
And all sorts of other combinations.
All these approaches are abstractions. They attempt to take the complexityof reality and created systematic models humans can understand and utilize to navigate the world. Sometimes this worked brilliantly (Islamic scholars preserved and advanced mathematics while Europe was busy forgetting how to build roads). Sometimes it worked less brilliantly (see: the entire history of medieval medicine).
Human systematic thinking began with the need to measure, count, and record reality accurately. These early accountants and surveyors were already practicing a primitive form of the empirical method – their answers were checked against actual inventories, if they calculated the volume of grain wrong – you could see it! They had to get the right answer because the consequences of being wrong were immediate and obvious. If you miscounted the grain stores there were potentially, very real and tangible consequences from a riot in the short term to possible starvation in the long term.
The problem with these early methods of interpreting the world was there was no reliable way to test for attribution or other errors unless the outcome or consequence was immediate. You know the consequence of smashing someone’s hand with a hammer – it’s immediate. When the hand heals though its hard to attribute how well or badly it healed to any one particular factor, it could be one or a combination of many things thataffected the healing – from bandaging and splinting to diet, to activities done while injured to a divine spirit passing by and blessing it.
Aristotle vs. Reality
Aristotle, brilliant as he was, decided through pure reasoning that heavy objects fall faster than light ones. This seemed logical: heavier things should fall faster, right? For nearly2,000 years, scholars nodded sagely and repeated this “fact”—apparently without any of them bothering to drop two rocks and watch what happened. When Galileo finally did the experiment, reality rudely disagreed with 2,000 years of respected wisdom.
The Four Humors
Medieval doctors confidently diagnosed illness based on imbalances of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile – an idea that went all the way back to the to the days of Aristotle. Feeling sick? Obviously you have too much blood, time for some therapeutic bleeding! This system was elegant, comprehensive, and killed an impressive number of patients. But it felt right to doctors, fit with their theoretical framework, and had ancient authority behind it. The fact that it didn’t actually work was less important than the fact that it made intellectual sense and its not actually working didn’t bother anyone for over a millennia.
The Gradual Emergence of Scientific Method
What we call the scientific method emerged gradually as thinkers developed ways to force ideas to confront reality.
This was first formalized by Francis Bacon in the 17th Century and it continues to change, evolve and improve by application of the method to itself. It was at this point ‘science’ as we understand it today was truly born. For the first time in history we had a system, an algorithm, a process, that could objectively measure the validity, or accuracy, of all the abstract concepts different people used to interact with their world.
Certain ideas are key to the methodology.
An emphasis on reproducible observation: If you can’t show it to others, it’s not reliable knowledge.
Mathematical description: Numbers are indifferent feelings, quantification reduces potential bias and encourages accurate duplication.
Controlled experimentation: Isolate variables. Whenever possible test only one variable at a time so you know what changes to that variable mean to the outcome.
Peer scrutiny: Share results and methods so your work can be reproduced. More independent people conducting the same. or substantially similar experiments and finding similar results creates credibility.
Falsifiability: Every claim must be stated in a way that reality can prove it wrong. If there’s no possible evidence that could contradict your idea, it’s not science, it’s not analytical and it isn’t critical, it’s just unfalsifiable speculation. This separates genuine theory from untestable beliefs.
Willingness to revise conclusions: Being wrong isn’t shameful. Staying wrong when you have better evidence is cowardice.
This was revolutionary because the system evolves to continually reduce the degree of bias effecting our knowledge. And because we could test if things work or not. Scientific method grew and continues to grow – we learnt about using control groups, then blind studies, then double blind studies, we’ve learnt to use statistical analysis to determine anomalies in data and all sorts of other ways to reduce the noise in our results, create more accurate simulations of the world and give us a more accurate picture of our world.
What Makes Scientific Method Work
The scientific method has several features that force it to produce more and more accurate results over time. (This doesn’t mean that science doesn’t take a wrong turn sometime, but when it does and it catches it they correct and make sure that turn is no longer an option.)
1. It Can Be Proven Wrong (And That’s the Point)
It’s not a flaw, it’s a feature! Every scientific claim must be stated in a way that, if it’s false, reality can expose it as false.
Bad example:
“Everything happens for a reason” (unfalsifiable feel-good nonsense)
Good example
“This antibiotic kills streptococcus bacteria at concentrations above 10mg/L” (we can test this and reality will tell us if we’re full of it)
Remember all those confident medieval doctors? Their treatments couldn’t be proven wrong because they had excuses for every failure (“the patient’s humors were too imbalanced,” “we didn’t bleed him enough,” “Mercury was in retrograde”). Modern medicine makes specific, testable claims—and when those claims fail, we can’t just make excuses. Testable hypothesis are how sensible people think about their world.
2. Other People Can Check Your Work (And They Will)
Science requires that others review your work and can repeat your experiments and get the same results. This means:
- You can’t obscure data or results for very long (others will try the same thing and notice when their results don’t match yours)
- Personal biases gets filtered out or reduced (other researchers have different biases that cancel yours out)
- Mistakes get caught (fresh eyes spot errors you missed)
A Real example
In 1989, electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced they had achieved “cold fusion” – nuclear fusion at room temperature. This would have been revolutionary, so labs around the world immediately tried to replicate their results. Spoiler alert: nobody could. The claims collapsed within months because other scientists couldn’t reproduce the experiments. Compare this to, say, Freudian psychoanalysis, which has somehow survived over a century despite never producing reproducible or quantifiable results. (There are scientific ways of approaching psychiatry and psychotherapy this just wasn’t one of them).
3. It Predicts Things Before They Happen
Real scientific theories don’t just explain what we already know they allow us to predict what we should expect to find in new situations.
- Einstein’s relativity predicted that satellites had a time differential effects due to gravity effects (confirmed decades later when GPS was actually built)
- Germ theory predicted that sterilizing surgical instruments would reduce infections (it worked, shocking doctors who thought washing their hands was beneath their dignity)
- Evolution predicted we’d find transitional fossils in specific rock layers of specific ages (we did, repeatedly)
- Atomic theory predicted the existence of elements that hadn’t been discovered and told us exactly what properties they should have (they showed up right on schedule)
Any charlatan can explain why something happened after the fact. The test of a theory is can you accurately predict the outcome of future situations based upon it.
4. It Builds on Itself (Instead of Going in Circles)
Unlike other systems that cycle through fashions or constantly rediscover ancient wisdom, science accumulates knowledge. Each generation builds on the last because:
- Good ideas get kept and refined
- Bad ideas get discarded when better evidence appears
- New tools let us test things our ancestors couldn’t
- The process itself improves as it is tested, refined and shared among a wide community
We don’t practice 18th-century medicine because 19th-century medicine was better, and we don’t practice 19th-century medicine because 20th-century medicine was better still. Meanwhile, many religious and philosophical traditions pride themselves on preserving unchanged ancient wisdom without growth.
The proof isn’t theoretical, it’s tangible. Scientific method has produced:
- Medicine that actually cures diseases instead of just making doctors feel important (goodbye, therapeutic bleeding; hello, antibiotics)
- Technology that works reliably regardless of your cultural background or personal beliefs (planes fly whether you believe in aerodynamics or not)
- Predictions that are accurate enough to plan your life around (weather forecasts, eclipse predictions, chemical reactions, your cars breaks)
- Understanding that lets us manipulate the world in precise ways (we can land robots on Mars; good luck getting your horoscope to tell you anything useful about tomorrow)
Addressing Common Objections (With Examples)
“But science changes its mind all the time! How can we trust it?”
Yes—that’s the point. When we get better evidence, we update our conclusions. This isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.
Consider: doctors used to think stomach ulcers were caused by stress and spicy food. Then Barry Marshall and Robin Warren proved they’re usually caused by bacteria. The medical establishment initially rejected this (because it contradicted established wisdom), but when the evidence became overwhelming, medicine changed its mind. Now we cure most ulcers with antibiotics instead of telling people to avoid spicy food and manage stress better.
That’s the point of science and a fundamental part of being human – we are always learning.
“Science can’t explain everything! What about love and consciousness?”
Not yet, but if we don’t kill ourselves as a species science it will get there. There is not a single reason postulated beyond appeals to ignorance that we shouldn’t.
Love
Neuroscience can show you the brain chemicals involved in romantic attachment, psychology can predict which relationships will last based on measurable behaviors, and evolutionary biology can explain why we’re wired to form pair bonds in the first place. We may not know the minutiae but love is most definitely a neuro cognitive process. We can even trigger it with certain drugs.
Consciousness
We’re mapping which brain states correspond to awareness, studying how anesthetics work, and building AI systems that mimic aspects of conscious thought. We don’t have all the answers yet, but we’re making progress using methods that actually produce results. And again, all the evidence points to, and there is no rational or reasonable reason to infer that, we will find anything but scientific answers.
We have absolutely no reason to infer that any knowledge we get in the future will be anything but scientific.
“What about morality? Science can’t tell us right from wrong!”
Actually, it can tell us quite a lot. For example we can study:
- Which moral systems actually reduce suffering and promote well-being
- How moral intuitions develop in children
- Why certain behaviors are considered wrong across cultures
- What happens to societies that adopt different ethical frameworks
- How different species approach communal issues
And much much more.…
Science can’t tell you what you should value, but once you decide you care about human flourishing, reducing suffering, or promoting justice, it can absolutely tell you which approaches actually work to achieve those goals. Would you rather base your ethics on untestable philosophical arguments or on evidence about what actually makes people’s lives better?
“Science is just another belief system/religion/way of knowing!”
No, it isn’t, and here’s how you can tell: science actively tries to prove itself wrong. Religions and belief systems typically resist challenges to their core assumptions. Scientists get famous for overturning established ideas (as long as they have good evidence).
When religious authorities claimed the Earth was 6,000 years old, geology and physics provided evidence it was billions of years old. The evidence won. When economists claimed markets were always rational, behavioral psychology provided evidence that humans are systematically irrational. The evidence won. When doctors claimed stomach ulcers were caused by stress, microbiology provided evidence they were caused by bacteria. The evidence won.
Try challenging the core assumptions of any other belief system and see how that goes.
The Bottom Line: Reality Doesn’t Care About Your Feelings
Scientific method isn’t just ‘another way of knowing’, it’s the first and only iterative method of knowledge gathering that systemically tests itself for faults and repairs them. It’s the only system ever created that allows us to empirically test the validity of an idea.
It works because:
- Reality gets the final vote (not authority, tradition, or wishful thinking)
- Errors get caught and corrected (instead of being hidden, protected, buried and/or rationalized)
- Results can be verified independently (you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it). This is one of the ways errors get caught.
- It makes testable predictions (so you can check if it actually works before betting your life on it)
Every other method humans have tried lacks these self-correcting features. That’s why scientific method has produced antibiotics, computers, and space travel.
If you’re skeptical of science, ask yourself what method you’d use to figure out if your medicine actually works, if your bridge will actually stand up, or if your weather forecast is actually accurate. At some point, you need a way to check your ideas against reality—and scientific method is the only approach humans have found that systematically does this.
That smartphone, laptop, e-reader that you’re probably reading this on? Those GPS directions you followed? That medical treatment that saved a relative’s life? The food you eat and the vehicles you use. All products of the same systematic approach to understanding reality that you’re questioning.
Reality is under no obligation to conform to your beliefs, preferences, or ancient wisdom. The universe doesn’t care if you find scientific conclusions uncomfortable, counterintuitive, or threatening to your worldview. Scientific method is simply our best tool for figuring out what’s actually true, as opposed to what we’d like to be true.
And honestly? That’s exactly why it works.