At the end of the day, science is simply really, really, educated guesswork, and sometimes we just don’t have enough information, the information changes, or we draw the wrong conclusions.
I’m obviously very thankful for science, I’m thankful for medical advancements that improve quality of life, I’m thankful for technology.
However, what our current situation with COVID-19 has helped us to see is that science can’t solve everything because it is based on human observation, and humans are limited. The scientific method by definition is inductive reasoning —scientists collect as much data as they can, and they run as many tests as they can, and then they draw logical inductions from that data. But by definition, inductive reasoning can never prove with certainty. We may not have sufficient data; there may be other factors involved that we didn’t forsee; or something might enter the situation later that was not present when we first started collecting data and running tests; or we may just draw the wrong conclusions because of our own limitations. At the end of the day, science is simply really, really, educated guesswork, and sometimes we just don’t have enough information, the information changes, or we draw the wrong conclusions.
