"The good thing about science..."

"...is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

I woke up this morning (please stop strumming that guitar) and practically the first thing I saw when I looked at the net was tthis statement, attractively printed on a t-shirt and attributed to Neil deGrasse Tyson, the darling of the Smart Set.

You have to admire it. It's textbook. The perfect example of the stealth insult. On a personal level the equivalent would be something like "the thing I love best about my mom is that she's not a cheap whore." It's got absolute plausible deniability. Hey, the guy's just talking about his mom. Implying? He's not implying anything. What you choose to read into what he's saying, why, that's up to you. Geez. Touch-eee. Maybe, you know, if you're so sensitive about it, maybe there's something about your mom you don't want people to know, hmmm?

And of course, it's perfectly true. Isn't it?

Well, let's just examine it for a moment.

"The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

For a start, it's badly phrased. "Science" cannot be true or false. It's a method, a methodology if you like, for finding and communicating facts. It cannot in itself be true or false, any more than "language" can be true or false in itself (Gödel). The statement should, I think, read "The good thing about the things science tells us is that they're true whether or not you believe in them." Yes, I think that's better. Not so good as a soundbite, but more accurate, and undeniably true. Isn't it?

I wonder, was it true in the sixteenth century? The seventeenth? The eighteenth? The nineteenth? I don't think so. What science told us then has since been revealed as only partially true, if that. Even what science told us in the twentieth century has been called into question in light of facts we couldn't discover, or prove, in previous epochs. Science is an ongoing process, every true scientist will tell you that.

So can we go with "The good thing about the things science tells us now is that they're true whether or not you believe in them"?

You know, I'm not sure we can. I'm not sure that, without cognisance of what science may tell us in the future, we can thus privilege its utterances now. If they had tried that in previous centuries, after all, they would have been embarrassingly wrong about a lot of things. But let's not get too bogged down in details. The scientific method is, after all, one of proven reliability, all our technologies are based on the things it has told us that have by chance turned out to be at least apparently true, and I'm sure it will one day come up with definite answers to our questions that will not be superseded by later discoveries. So we can arrive, finally, at an unchallengeable reformulation of Dr Tyson's statement:

"The good thing about the things I believe science will tell us one day is that they'll be true whether or not you believe in them."

Now that's a true statement, and I do believe it.

But we're not done yet. What is truth, said jesting Pilate, and all that. Is there such a thing as a statement that is true if you believe in it and not true if you don't? Dr Tyson seems to think there might be, but I'm not so sure. I'm a simple sort of soul; to me there is true and not true. If my shirt is green, no amount of belief on my part will make it red. If there is no invisible unicorn in this room, no amount of belief on my part will make there be one. I'm not in a position to prove either of these things--you might all believe my shirt is green, just as I do, but that doesn't constitute evidence that it is, and I don't have the kit for spectral analysis of the dyes--but that has no bearing on whether they are true or false. If there is an invisible unicorn in this room, then there is, just as there were (presumably) quarks and Higgs bosons and dark matter in Galileo's time even though they had no way of knowing it, or proving it with their science. If there is something true that science cannot prove right now, then it is true nonetheless, and belief is as irrelevant to that as it is to the things that it has (provisionally) proved.

The good thing about things that are true is that they are true whether or not you can prove them, with science or in any other way.

I ought to put that on a t-shirt.