Here is the text of a comment I made over at the Volokh Conspiracy. I have pasted it here so I don’t forget it.  OK, so there is a little bit of vanity here. But I do want to build on this theme. The context of this comment pertained to the teaching of science and the influence of proponents of Intelligent Design.

In the end, we who teach want students to be able to use their brains. We want them to be able to construct or use a theory to make predictions about the observable universe and then devise experiments to test their hypotheses. We want them to design positive experiments rather than negative experiments. We want them to use language and math to express what they are thinking. We want students to be comfortable using a working hypothesis while they are working on a problem, just as long as they remember that it is just that- a working model.

We want students to learn to follow the evidence and draw a conclusion rather that start with a conclusion and cherry-pick the data to be consistent with preconceptions. The glory in science is to be able to tip over the established order in favor of new insights and understanding based on data. In the end, scientific methodology is about intellectual honesty and accountability.

All measurement involves error which causes a certain amount of uncertainty in a result. You don’t have to invoke Heisenberg to consider uncertainty. A result is only as good as your worst data. This leads to my final point.

A sign of good training or instinct in science is the ability to be sceptical or at least a bit hesitant about your conclusions. Hesitant in the sense that your conclusion is to be considered within a set boundary conditions.

A scientific outlook has served me well in general. At least so far. The world would be much more complex if I had to invoke a miracle every time something odd happened.

As is common at this site, a cluster of blood-sucking fuss budgets are haggling over minutae.  I’ll bet not a damned one of them ever had to make sense out of a mass spectrum or isolate a new substance and prove it.