Do you believe in science?

Do you believe in science? The question has become something of a litmus test for partisan sorting around contentious issues like the pandemic and climate change. Many Americans proudly proclaim their answer like a badge of honor.

But one notable group shies away from the question entirely: scientists.

For those who have devoted their lives to the scientific method, the interlinking of science with dogmatic belief can feel counterproductive and unnecessarily divisive.

The goal of science isn’t to produce irrefutable facts to believe or disbelieve. The goal is to further knowledge through hypothesis, observation, and experimentation. The scientific method provides a framework to continually question, test, and refine that knowledge. As a result, our understanding of the physical world is constantly evolving. New discoveries and research can deepen the contours of our understanding. And they can contradict what we thought we already knew, sparking fresh questions and sometimes even changing the course of thought entirely (see Galileo versus the Catholic Church).

But this ever-shifting body of knowledge doesn’t mesh with people’s tendency to sort ideas and each other into a fixed binary framework. And that’s where discussions of science’s believers and disbelievers can get in the way.

This binary thinking has long clouded political debates about efforts to slow climate change. But some say this binary labeling has found its way into the climate science community itself in a way that minimizes the uncertainties around current understanding. The Monitor’s Stephanie Hanes explores this idea in depth in the cover story featured in the June 10 edition of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly.

I’ll let you discover for yourself how that unfolds in her story. But first, it’s helpful to note that uncertainty is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the scientific process. 

“Scientific journal articles rarely describe conclusions as entirely certain,” Beth A. Covitt and Charles W. Anderson, both science education researchers, wrote in the journal Science & Education. “Although popular images of science can describe scientists as discovering indisputable facts, communication among scientists in journal articles is epistemologically far more complex.”

In public discourse, those uncertainties can come across as doubt. But for scientists, the acknowledgment of uncertainties offers a degree of transparency, a way to show where questions remain so that others can design further studies to deepen understanding of a given issue.

“All information has at least a small degree of uncertainty,” climate scientists Sophie Lewis and Ailie Gallant wrote in a 2013 article for The Conversation. “Each puzzle piece is imperfect: they might be a little bit out of focus, or perhaps slightly discoloured. But despite their imperfections, they are still recognisable.”