I believe that truth is important. I think most would agree. So how does one arrive at the “truth”?
Let’s start with an example. Let’s say I make a product that I claim cures cancer. I call this product EffCancer. I *could* just say, “Take my word for it, EffCancer works.” That seems a little odd doesn’t it? Wouldn’t you want verifiable evidence that it works? Instead of just taking my word for it, you could do your own tests involving cancer patients and EffCancer. It would be very easy to see if the product actually made a difference. To test it carefully, you would have to remove all other drugs from the cancer patient (or know very well how the current drugs a patient is on could interact with EffCancer or said patients).
You would use a placebo drug (a drug that you know does nothing, like a sugar pill). This is what is known as your control group. This helps weed out any further irregularities that could affect the experiment.
In this kind of test, you’d also want to remove as much human bias as possible. You’d have the personnel giving the EffCancer/placebos to the patients be unaware whether they are giving EffCancer/placebo. This helps eliminate human bias by not suggesting to the patient what they are getting.
Then, you can finally look at the results. If your study is large, you can plug the numbers into the computer and look at the rates to see if EffCancer actually made a difference.
Science isn’t that hard. We do it every day. On our commutes we try different routes to see which is the fastest. This can sometimes be a moving target in various seasons, but once we have several tests under our belt we look at the data and can tell generally which route is the fastest. This is science. When we are children we bang on pots and pans, testing to see the different sounds and volumes of each. This is also science.
The scientific process can be applied to anything in life. When we don’t use it in certain segments of our lives we are short-changing ourselves in discovering the truth about the world around us.