In a perfect world, any random person would have the ability to independently verify any scientific claim they cared to. But as you imply, our world is far from perfect. Many scientific facts require heavy training and/or expensive equipment to verify that most people just don't have. But the cool thing is that IF you did have the skills and gear (and patience, free time, assistants, etc.), you absolutely can image a virus particle, or measure the mass of an electron (not all that complicated, it turns out!), or take your own observations of the motion of the planets and re-derive Kepler's laws of planetary motion.
> My point is that no one is personally verifying science. On an individual level we cannot be sure that these are not stories and hearsay.
You should hang out with more scientists. It turns out they count as "someone"!
> Science, as we do it, ie based on trust and without personal verification, is absolutely equivalent to religion. A comforting, explanatory story is provided and we believe we 'know' what is happening. Scientists are our priests and we take their pronouncements as gospel, without questioning them.
This is a grossly false equivalency. The thing with any scientific claim is that you could independently verify it; in practice, verifying modern scientific claims tends to cost tons of time and money, but nothing in principle prevents you.
"A 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists reported that 70% of them had failed to reproduce at least one other scientist's experiment (50% had failed to reproduce one of their own experiments). In 2009, 2% of scientists admitted to falsifying studies at least once and 14% admitted to personally knowing someone who did. Misconducts were reported more frequently by medical researchers than others."
Its not a joke.
Also, there is the question of funding in science. The government, the military and private corporations basically provide all the funding.
Do you think they fund things that are not in their interests? That good food would be more effective than medicine? Stuff like that?
If they fund a study that produces data that is contrary to the general narrative, do you think that will be published?
Do you think they will fund those studies that are against their narrative?
I love science, and the scientific method. But, not the science we have. It really is akin to religion - both are means of governance of the masses by controlling what is acceptable to think about.
The replication crisis is only possible precisely because scientific claims are by definition falsifiable. What's the religious equivalent of the replication crisis? Holy wars?
The replication crisis is an alarming and embarrassing problem, driven largely by the slavish "publish or perish" incentive structure. But I don't think this relates to your original claim that "no one - NO ONE - is verifying anything personally. No one is testing the claims." It's through exactly those attempts at verification and testing that scientists are realizing that standards of statistics, transparency, and integrity are not good enough.
> I love science, and the scientific method. But, not the science we have. It really is akin to religion - both are means of governance of the masses by controlling what is acceptable to think about.
Science is inextricably linked to politics and society, as you rightly point out. Good science indeed can and should guide policy and governance, but calling that "controlling what is acceptable to think about" is wildly pessimistic.
Your argument has evolved into "scientists and science is imperfect due to various sources of bias." That's true, but I disagree that this makes science "absolutely equivalent to religion."
> My point is that no one is personally verifying science. On an individual level we cannot be sure that these are not stories and hearsay.
You should hang out with more scientists. It turns out they count as "someone"!
> Science, as we do it, ie based on trust and without personal verification, is absolutely equivalent to religion. A comforting, explanatory story is provided and we believe we 'know' what is happening. Scientists are our priests and we take their pronouncements as gospel, without questioning them.
This is a grossly false equivalency. The thing with any scientific claim is that you could independently verify it; in practice, verifying modern scientific claims tends to cost tons of time and money, but nothing in principle prevents you.