In Science

I was watching a video by a conservative politician criticizing science for its “replication crisis.” He implied that science was a search for truth and that this crisis implied it was failing.

For background, here’s the top of Wikipedia’s Replication crisis page:

The replication crisis, also known as the reproducibility or replicability crisis, refers to widespread failures to reproduce published scientific results. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is the cornerstone of the scientific method,[2] such failures undermine the credibility of theories and challenge substantial parts of scientific knowledge.

Here’s a quote from a prominent paper on the subject, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False by John Ioannidis:

There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.

Quite a conclusion!

Though I’ll note my field of physics appears less affected. An article in The Guardian, “Physics envy: Do ‘hard’ sciences hold the solution to the replication crisis in psychology?” said : “Psychology clearly has some growing up to do. Critics may argue that it isn’t fair to judge psychology by the standards of physics, arguably the Olympic athlete of the sciences.” I hope you don’t mind my indulging in posting a picture of the satellite I worked on, XMM-Newton, or at least an artist’s rendering:

A relevant article and book in conservative media, for reference: The American Conservative The Crisis Wrecking Modern Science. Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth, by Stuart Ritchie.

My Question: What about reproducibility in religion?

I learned the practice of science and as I understood it, every measurement had some error. Every theory could be proved wrong by an experiment. Therefore, I understood that science could prove a theory false but could never prove something true. That limitation didn’t take away from science. It just clarified a limitation. I think the politician was setting an impossibly high bar.

Conservative politicians talk about religion all the time, specifically as a source for truth.

What about reproducibility in religion?

Different people belonging to different religions tell me things based on their religions that they said are true but that contradict each other.

I’m not taking a stand on this issue. On the other hand, if people point out problems with a place the consider a source of truth, if those problems exist yet more in another area, should they also take that field to task? They don’t, so what do we make of their apparent double standard?

What about reproducibility in religion? What about conflicting truth claims there?