In the scientific method the world has the final say

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Scientists, or those who use the rational method, are often accused of simply adopting one belief instead of another, a true faith in science, which is (inappropriately) given the name of scientism. This accusation is unfounded, for a simple reason: the decisive difference between those who use the scientific method and those who reject it is not in believing or not believing, but in the way in which one believes . In fact, there is no human knowledge that does not imply, at least in part, an act of trust: believing that our senses do not systematically deceive us, that the past is an indication of the future, that our inferences are correct, that others do not deliberately lie to us when they report an experiment. But what distinguishes the scientific method is not the illusion of doing without belief: it is the construction of an entire theoretical and practical apparatus that allows those same beliefs to be subjected to verification, to make them transparent, and above all to accept that they can be denied.

The rationalist armed with the scientific method, in this sense, is not one who refuses to believe, but one who has decided to believe under conditions: he believes in the value of the evidence, as long as the evidence holds up; he believes in the method, as long as it proves to be the best at producing correct and coherent predictions; he believes in the results, but only provisionally, until better data emerge. It is a way of believing that includes the principle of its own possible falsification, and it is precisely this openness to denial that radically distinguishes it from dogmatic faith .

Those who accuse science of being an alternative dogma—a secularized creed that has merely replaced God with Nature, or religious authority with that of the expert—confuse the content of a belief with its epistemic structure. But not all beliefs are equivalent, nor are the ways in which they are formulated, nor the criteria by which one decides whether to maintain or abandon them. A belief that resists all refutation, that seeks only confirmation and rejects all possible counter-evidence, does not have the same status as a belief that arises from a process of public inquiry, replicable and self-correcting. To say that both are "acts of faith" is like saying that an airplane and a parachute are "both things that fly": one completely misses the difference that makes the difference.

The fundamental point is that, in the scientific method, the world has the final say . One can elaborate sophisticated theories, coherent models, powerful narratives, but if experience — that is, controlled interaction with reality — disproves them, they must be abandoned. This is where the non-dogmatic nature of science is shown: it does not claim infallibility, but on the contrary organizes knowledge in such a way that error is not only possible, but expected, and that the conditions for recognizing it are accessible to all. One does not rely on science as such, but on its capacity to correct itself, to reformulate itself, to learn from its own limits. It is a structured trust, and not blind faith .

Science, in short, is not a system that eliminates belief, but a system that educates belief, subjecting it to severe conditions of legitimacy. Those who reject science believe, and those who practice it believe; but the former believes in spite of everything, the latter until proven otherwise . Herein lies the true distance: not in faith in a certain type of reality, but in the quality of control and the disposition to change belief.

So yes, even the scientist has faith in a method and in the statements that have been tested with that method; but if both the first and the second were to fail, faced with a new test, he would consider himself lucky, because it is from here that discoveries are born, and his beliefs and those of the entire scientific community change .

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