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S2E09 TRANSCRIPT:

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Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm your host Yucca

Mark: And I'm your host, Mark.

Yucca: And this week we're actually talking about science. And how science plays into science-based paganism, what science really is, and a little bit around the current events with the relationship of science and paganism.

Mark: Right. This subject is very timely as it turns out. We've been wanting to do this episode for a while. But as it turns out, there is a sort of controversial thread on Starhawk's Facebook page currently in which she expressed her happiness about getting the second installment of the COVID-19 vaccination and really had a number of people, I wouldn't say a majority, but quite a number of people, very hostile to vaccination, very hostile to the pharmaceutical industry, science products and really attacking her quite a bit personally for her going along with what we currently know in, in terms of medical science for addressing COVID-19.

So we felt that it would be a good time to talk about science what it is, what it, isn't, how that dovetails with our scientific, science-based pagan practices and what that all means, how that all fits together.

Yucca: Exactly. Yeah. So a huge amount to cover here.

Mark: Yes.

Yucca: So let's dive in. I think we should actually start with the topic of what is science in the first place, because this is an area where as important as it is in our lives, there's a tremendous amount of misconception around just the concept of science itself.

Mark: Yes indeed. One of the, one of those misconceptions is something that atheists encounter quite a bit in their conversation with people who are, I guess what I would call credulous religionists people who have beliefs that are not evidence-based, but are more experiential based. So they believe things because they've had experiences or simply because they've been told that they're true by people who they believe.

And that accusation is that atheists, and this would also be true of godless pagans, worship science or that our our trust in the products of science is as much faith based as the faith based Willie of someone who believes in God's, for example hear that pretty frequently in those circles.

And it's not true. But in order to understand that it's not true you need to know what science is to begin with and what it's not. Science is not an assertion of a cosmology apropos of nothing. That's not what it is. It's not an assertion that these things are true and you must believe them.

It's an evidence-based process.

Yucca: So let's start by unpacking what somebody could mean when they say science. So typically in the English speaking world, if we say science, there's one of three things that we could be referring to. And first and foremost, science is a process. It's a process of inquiry of learning about the world and in school, they might've made you memorize the scientific method or the scientific process that you had to go through in each of the steps and observation, and hypothesis and all of that. And that's an idealized version of the process. In real life it's never so cut and dry and clean. It's very messy. But that's what we're doing. Now, science, when someone says science, they could also be referring to the body of knowledge, which has been gained through that. Process. So if you take a biology course or you pick up a book about physics, those are talking about the things that we have learned by doing science.

Now, the third way that the word gets used is science can also refer to the institutions or the people who practice science.

So when you read a headline that says science says XYZ is bad for you. Well, science as an a process can't say anything. It's a process. It's a tool that we're using a body of knowledge. Can't say anything, but institutions can take positions. They