Too often, debates rely on bad evidence. People argue with confidence, speaking ability, emotional manipulation, psychological tricks, and insults instead of slowing down and objectively looking at the evidence. The goal becomes appearing to be right rather than finding the truth.
This is a serious problem in public debates, including presidential debates, where performance often matters more than accuracy. Unfortunately, many people are persuaded by these tactics because they are emotionally powerful, even when the evidence is false.
In today's world, there has been an attack on science and objective truth.
There are evolutionary reasons why this works on people. For most of human history, humans did not survive by carefully weighing objective evidence. They survived by reading emotions, trusting their group, recognizing threats, and making quick decisions. Human beings evolved to survive, not necessarily to be objectively correct.
Because of this, we are often better at understanding personal truth than objective truth. Personal truth is based on feelings, experience, identity, loyalty, and emotion. Objective truth is based on evidence, measurement, testing, and reality outside of our personal opinions. As a result, emotional appeals are often more persuasive than objective evidence, even when the objective evidence is correct.
Before the scientific revolution, most debates were not settled by careful testing or objective measurement. With some important exceptions, such as parts of ancient Greece and Rome, truth was often decided by power, wealth, status, military strength, religious authority, or who could speak with the most confidence. Clearly, this is not a reliable way to discover what is true. It is not surprising, that human beings often default to personal truth over objective truth even when the fact say otherwise.
After the scientific revolution, this gradually began to change, and the results for society have been astonishing. For example, if a person went to sleep in Europe in the year 1000 and woke up in 1500, the world would look different, but still recognizable in many ways. However, if that same person went to sleep in 1500 and woke up in 2000, they would wake up in a completely different world: computers, airplanes, modern medicine that actually works, electricity, global communication, satellites, advanced surgery, and technologies that would have seemed impossible. This is all because of science!
That transformation did not happen because people became better at arguing emotionally. It happened because a few people learned to test claims, measure reality, challenge assumptions, repeat experiments, and follow evidence. This is why the scientific method is one of the most important discoveries in human history. Much of the modern world exists because people used scientific thinking to understand nature more accurately.
These people are what we call scientists. They are the reason so much human progress, invention, discovery, and innovation has been possible. Scientists are not people who never feel emotion or never have personal beliefs. They are people who have learned to quiet those emotions long enough to look at the evidence honestly.
They do not ask, "What do I want to be true?" They ask, "What does the evidence actually show?"
That discipline is rare. Most people naturally defend what they already believe. Scientists, at their best, do the opposite. They train themselves to question their assumptions, test their ideas, and follow the evidence even when it leads somewhere uncomfortable.
This is why scientific thinking has produced so much of the modern world. Progress comes from people willing to see reality as it is, not merely as they wish it to be.
But our biology has not fully adapted to a world built on science and objectivity. People still fall back on personal truth when evaluating the world. People still believe confident people. We still trust claims that make us feel good. We still reject evidence that threatens our identity or worldview.
This may be more obvious today than at any other time in modern history. Governments, political leaders, media personalities, and internet "experts" can spread misinformation quickly and confidently. People often believe these claims without asking what the evidence actually shows. This is how scientific progress can begin to backslide: not because the evidence disappears, but because people stop respecting evidence.
One common misconception is that science is based on authority. In reality, science is often the opposite of authority. Science does not ask, "Who has the most power?" Science asks, "What does the evidence show?" The true beauty of evidence is, once shown it cannot be bullied by powerful people, governments or those who with to cover it up. This is one of the strongest reasons I decided to purse a career in this field. That, and the desire I have to make the world a better place by helping those around me.
The scientific method does not care who you are, what you believe, what country you come from, how confident you sound, how wealthy you are, how powerful you are, or how well you present yourself. The evidence is what matters. The claim must stand or fall based on evidence alone.
Practicing science is hard. It requires humility. It requires admitting when we are wrong. It requires challenging deeply held beliefs. It requires separating what we want to be true from what the evidence actually supports. That is not easy for anyone.
As a master's-educated healthcare professional, medical science practitioner, and college professor, I have made a personal commitment to scientific reasoning in the work I do. Over the past ten years, I have had the privilege of working beside brilliant people in the medical profession who take evidence seriously. I have been part of countless discussions where the goal was not to win an argument, but to find the truth.
As someone who was a below-average high school student, I owe much of my growth to people who helped me develop my objective reasoning skills. They helped train my mind to think more clearly, evaluate evidence more carefully, and become the educated person I am today.