How do we find out what is true?

Is there an ultimate truth?

What is true and false?

How do you discern what is true from what is wishful thinking, imaginary, delusional or manipulative?

How can we integrate experience, wisdom, intuition and instinct with reason and science?

How can we maximise the quality of science?

How can we make science accessible to the public?

How can we educate the public and policy makers to be intelligent consumers of science?

If anyone tells you that they know the absolute truth, you should be very suspicious. People like that have sent millions to their graves and exploited billions of others. For most of history, humans determined what was right and wrong using a combination of judgement, intuition, wisdom, instinct, reason, trial and error, tradition and faith. Western Civilization has refined reason through philosophy and law and trial and error through science. We need to combine all of them, as none is sufficient in itself. In fact, in isolation, each of them has the potential to lead us astray. Our judgements can be nothing more than mistaken prejudices. Our wisdom can be mythology. Reason can lose its moral compass and make false assumptions. Tradition worked in the past, but doesn’t necessarily hold the key to the present or future. Religion and faith can be distorted and corrupted, or may simply be false. Science is one of the gems of Western Civilization but must be used properly. Used incorrectly it can simply slip into being faith, tradition, prejudice and convention.

Science is a way of trying to explain, understand, predict and manipulate the world. Science tries to be as objective as possible. We break the world down into the smallest component parts. We observe them, measure them and develop hypotheses about the truth. To do that, we have to make some assumptions about the world. In other words, we propose a theory about how things work. That theory can be tested by asking various questions. Is it logical? Does it make sense? Does it explain the world? Is it parsimonious? Is it internally consistent? Is it intuitively valid? Are the concepts measurable, meaningful, causal, observable and non-reducible? By far the best test of a theory is to ask whether it can make predictions about the future that can subsequently be proven or disproven with experiments. Experiments are designed to test hypotheses and to exclude the many forms of bias, such as poor measurement, false assumptions, scientists’ egos, money, power and cognitive errors. Good science should be observable, objective, repeatable, measurable, predictive and have minimum bias.