>>12481
You need a demarcation. You need everyone to agree on what it is they're talking about. To be able to draw the line, identify and distinguish, what science is, to tell it apart from what it's not.
That's not how people experience science. You experience science when you're a kid, and your parents, or the TV, or teachers, tell you about this awesome thing called "science". So you imagine there's this something out there, that the name's referring to.
And your whole life you're taught to associate certain things with science, like microscopes and medicine, computers and rocket ships, math and evolution and chemistry.
And there's a whole bunch of things you're taught to associate with not-science, like alchemy, and magic, and religion, and carpentry, and comedy.
But when it comes down to it, no one ever told you what it was about the "science" things that made them uniquely science, and what it was about the not-science things that made them not science.
Lots of people have tried to make sense of these arbitrary collections of categories. There are lots of different demarcations for what does or doesn't count as science.
None of them are good enough, because no one can agree on which one is right. If science were this real, objective thing, it would be easy to tell the demarcation. You know what a thing is, then you know what it's not, and you can tell the two apart.
There are lots of great things labelled "science". There's lots of tech, really good stuff. There's lots of ambiguous things, speculation and philosophy, that are labelled "science", too. The latter don't become the equal of the former just because they share a label. That's called equivocation.
"Muh science!" doesn't solve anything. Different issues can be debated. Whether or not some vaccines might cause autism in some cases, whether or not man made climate change is occurring, these are propositions about reality. They're questions of truth, just like any other.
Science doesn't enter into it. Science doesn't exist. It's a subjective figment of our minds. A collection of associations and impressions we're taught to see the world through.
The idea that scientists are more moral, or trustworthy, or more likely to be right, than their critics, has never been demonstrated to be true. The profession of "science" is rife with long histories of fraud, error blindly accepted as fact, and dubious philosophy. Scientists need to be held accountable by outside authorities. If they're not, they'll become corrupt, just like any other unaccountable organization.
People can criticize scientists. "Science" doesn't factor into legitimate debate. What we can observe, and how we should interpret it, does. It's possible for the majority of scientists to be stupidly, unthinkingly wrong about things. Even about majorly important things. Scientists are human. Humans can be stupid in ways they aren't even aware of.
And science is stupid. It makes people stupid. Like all the fedora tippers, people who bring up Occam's Razor and falsificationism like they're just self evidential paths to truth, without ever demonstrating it.
The entire mythology scientists have created, of an evil dogmatic dark age, and the noble martyr Galileo, who could prove in the 17th century that the Earth revolved around the sun, and the evil churchmen who just couldn't handle his truth, and blindly clung to their obviously false dogmas out of pettiness and fear - that myth is false. It's a lie. Historians, secular, progressive historians, even they realize it's false.
But the myth lives on. It appeals to human arrogance. The job of a scientists appeals to arrogant people. Not all of them are arrogant. There are lots of good scientists. But scientists are human. They can be corrupted. They have been.
And anyone can become a scientist. Liars, cheaters, people who only care about themselves. Arrogant, selfish people.
You want to debate climate change, or the health of GMOs, or the safety of vaccines, fine. We can do that. You start by looking at experience. What you can see, what you're being told, who's telling it to you. How trust worthy they are. What methods they use. How you make sense of everything. You try to see if you can come to a conclusion. You try to figure out if that conclusion's right.
But "science" doesn't come into it. "Science" is a losing argument. It doesn't exist, it's not real. It's just a club losers use to beat people over the head when the losers start losing arguments.
If you can prove something, do it. If you can't prove it, and you think people should believe it any way, prove that. Don't just scream "science, science!" Because it doesn't solve anything.