How I use the Scientific Method Every Day

I love Jesus. Most of the time I like Jesus. I am learning to love the church again. These are thoughts as I continue my faith journey from deconstruction to reconstruction and beyond…

I am a geek and I love the scientific method. There.

A lot of people believe that the scientific method is just for scientists. But Oh that is so not true. In fact I think that if we applied the scientific method to our personal belief systems and public discourse we would all be in a much better place.

The two aspects of the scientific method I want to address are research integrity and peer review.

Research integrity means that we never take short cuts to disprove our hypothesis. We give it all we have and research every aspect, every equation, every function. A great deal of effort is made to prevent us from making emotional decisions. Rather we let the facts and figures guide the decisions. The point is that we put a LOT of effort into discerning truth and intentionally avoid emotional decisions. We work incessantly to disprove our hypothesis until the only conclusion is that our hypothesis is right before we present our findings.

And then after working SO hard we open up our research to peer review.

If we worked so hard to find the answer, why do we even need to ask others if we are correct? We ask others because humans are fallible. We regularly do our very best research and come up with the wrong truth.

So we do our very best research and then humbly present our findings to our community to see what they think about our discoveries. That is the dichotomy we live with. If we did our very best research we should not have to humbly present our findings, right? And if we must humbly present our findings, why work so hard at the research? If we don't do our very best research we can never uncover truths that have been hiding from us, and if we don't humbly present our findings we risk persisting with a wrong interpretation that our community could have saved us from.

Let's apply these ideas to the culture wars and the current political environment. Many of us don't do good research. We incorrectly equate hearing the same idea told to us 50 different ways with research. That is not research. In the scientific method we form a hypothesis and then test it by trying to DISPROVE it. If we think something FOX News or MSNBC says is true, research is reading information NOT on those sites to get more information that could disprove the hypothesis. If after doing our very best research, we can not disprove the hypothesis, we can know we have done our due diligence, but the job is not done until presenting our ideas to our peers for their review.

Peer review is not posting a diatribe on social media. It is presenting your ideas intelligently and succinctly with humility and openness to feedback. When the feedback comes, peer review is listening carefully to the feedback and seeing where you could have been off in some way whether small or great. It is also going out of your way to welcome conversation. Most people are so used to fighting, they forget how to discourse. You must help create a safe space for discussions.

The systems in our world tend to tell us and retell us the same things. They discern what our hunches are and they find people and systems that will tell us we are right and solidify our beliefs without presenting anything to the contrary. They work us up emotionally so that the beliefs become intrenched in our psyche.

Consider theology. It is a hallmark of the Protestant church that every person should be able to read the Bible for themselves. Taking that further, it is a hallmark of the evangelical church that each person can interpret the Bible independently and “know” they have interpreted it correctly because when God spoke to us. The church would be so much better if we diligently studied the Bible but then humbly allowed peers and mentors to speak into our lives to correct or confirm our interpretation. Note: there is no such thing as the plain reading of the text; there are only interpretations. 

But there is a way out. We must do our very best research and then humbly present our findings to our community to see what they think about our discoveries. When we work hard and dialog effectively, there will be nothing that can stop us from solving our community's challenges.