Do you think it is possible to believe one kind of science but deny another?

[Yo_Mama]

34. Science doesn't have much to do with belief, does it?

Conviction, maybe, if you find the evidence for one scientific hypothesis more convincing than another. Because science is a system developed on evidence, it is reasonable to doubt any piece of it until you can find strong evidence suggesting your doubt is wrong - that is in fact what scientists DO - but even then you may not be right.

Certain parts of science have such strong evidence that we can take them as fact. Others are less supported.

For example, before this flu season we would have assumed that the flu vax would be far more effective than it turned out to be. You would have been sensible to conclude that getting the flu shot gave you much better odds against getting the flu than in fact resulted.

I think people who talk about science, or any branch of it, as if it is all one entire black box that must be accepted in toto or rejected in toto are missing the point entirely.

As for medical science and climate science, they are both fascinating endeavors with high levels of uncertainty at some points, and both are fields of science in which our knowledge is growing rapidly, so things we thought we knew one decade turn out not to be true the next decade.