I’m acquainted with the scientific method myself, but when I try to explain it to science deniers I always fall short of capturing what makes it such a universal and thorough method. Any help?
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What makes science truly a thorough process is not the scientific method itself, because at the end of the day, the scientific method uses a circular argument. This is known in philosophy as “the problem of induction,” as science uses its own history of results to justify it being a good judge of results.
What makes science a thorough process is that scientists hate being wrong even more than they hate having been wrong. When some scientist comes up with something new, it faces a gauntlet of other scientists attempting to disprove the new discovery. If the new discovery can hold up against all criticism, it can replace the old idea. Over time, the belief that the sun revolves around the earth was disproved by science, but even other scientists at the time had competing theories. Tycho Brahe in particular attempted to explain an alternative to the Copernican idea of how celestial bodies move, and Johannes Kepler though that the planets orbited based on a kind of mathematical perfection, where they all aligned with the nesting of perfect three-dimensional shapes called Platonic solids. You may know these shapes from the dice used for role-playing games.
Over time, the scientific community is what has made science work. The scientific method works because it is always open to questioning things, and it accepts the outcomes, no matter what those outcomes are. It isn’t a perfect guide to understanding the universe. Instead, it is a very basic framework for structuring a question about reality so that you can test an idea. The rest of science is data that we have accumulated by asking questions, making observations, and usually being disappointed.
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