[hodgesrm]

It's perhaps useful to look at the positions of scientists themselves. First, there's not a clear boundary between scientific and non-scientific inquiry. Isaac Newton spent a considerable amount of time investigating alchemy among other subjects. He also held views well outside the mainstream on religion. [0]

Second, scientists can be just as obstinate as anyone. There is abundant evidence of scientists failing to modify their views in response to new ideas and data. Plate tectonics comes lightly to mind--many of those who opposed it never changed their minds. It prevailed in part because the opposition retired or died. [1]

If scientists themselves can be so resistant to rational inquiry, why do we uphold this as an ideal for ordinary citizens?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-continent...

[YorkshireSeason]

In what sense is alchemy (in the way Newton understood it) not science?

It was a reasonable hypothesis at the time that you can make gold from other material. Indeed with particle accelerators you can do this [1, 2, 3]. Newton's methods were not powerful enough to achieve this, but this research hypothesis got refined, leading to chemistry as we know it today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals

[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...

[3] https://glintpay.com/gold/modern-day-alchemy-making-gold-ato...

[hodgesrm]

That's a fair question which is why I also included Newton's work on religion, which was apparently something of an obsession.

My answer is that humans--even really extraordinary ones like Isaac Newton--don't divide knowledge into scientific and non-scientific spheres.

Moreover, commonly used analytic tools like inductive reasoning that are helpful in science don't answer questions like what happens when we die in a very satisfactory way. Even in much more mundane questions humans tend to see patterns where they don't exist. [0] It's still an open question which types of problems are properly the domain of science.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion