I'm starting to lose faith in science
So am I. At least I've grown a lot more skeptical about popular news articles that proclaim "Scientists Say...!" (usually something to the effect that everything that other people believe is wrong). Just wait a little while, and you are apt to see articles proclaiming scientists announcing the exact opposite.
A lot of that isn't really coming from the scientists, it's coming from journalists who have somehow inserted themselves between scientists and the people. If we read the actual papers that the scientists in question published, they are often couched in qualifiers that the journalists leave out, like 'maybe' and 'could have'. What the papers are often presenting are
hypotheses about some open scientific question, clearly identified as such. The paper may be announcing the hypothesis itself, or perhaps some bit of evidence in favor of a particular hypothesis. Yet it's presented to the people as conclusive, supposedly with all of the social authority of science behind it.
because scientists still have no clue how the human body works and why the body works differently in different people.
Medical science knows a tremendous amount about how the body works. More than anyone could learn in a single lifetime. The problem is often a matter of turning all that knowledge into effective treatments. (Life is just so incredibly complex...)
Scientists don't even know why we people feel and process pain very differently than others.
That introduces a very different set of questions. What is conscious experience? That's far more of a work-in-progress and little besides vague (and probably wrong) hypotheses exist at present. Even the neuroscientists can't speak with any authority about the phenomenology of consciousness. When the science journalists write about it, no matter how interesting and stimulating it might be, it's probably not something that you should accept as hard truth. It's still just guesses.
The problem with science is that some influential scientists are too arrogant to admit that there is a problem.
Many scientists are more circumspect. (Or at least were.) I think that it's the science journalists in search of a hook that more often try to turn a scientific community speculating about answers to a scientific problem into a battle to the death, often with one faction identified as the good guys and the other as the obscurantist villains. They think that it's more interesting to their readers that way. Scientists might have some responsibility for it themselves, when egos and future careers are riding on the success of particular hypotheses.
Science has become too political and less focused on progress in obtaining objective knowledge and to seek means to reach the truth.
Yes. The scientific process is subverted when researchers start out with their conclusions already fixed in their minds, typically for extrascientific reasons, and their work is designed around "proving" whatever these scientists already believe. So science ceases to be an open-minded search for truth and turns into a project to advance the scientists' careers, serve the interests of those who fund them, or to advance a particular social/political agenda that the scientist might believe in for their own perhaps a-rational reasons.
Science obviously does not progress and this is why I am disappointed in this whole enterprise.
My confidence in science is declining, I must say. Perhaps that's mostly a function of my having long held an unrealistic and overly idealistic Paddoboyish mental picture of science that was never entirely accurate. So perhaps part of it is my fault and I'm just waking up to reality.
