Certainty II

 

Rock Of Ages

Rock of ages cleft for me
Let me hide myself in Thee
Let the water and the blood
From Thy wounded side which fload
Thee of sin the double cure
Save from raft and make me pure.

Why can’t scientists be pure, i.e. 100% certain?

Ivory Soap is 99 and 44/100 percent pure.  The best test result in science is 5-sigma, (99.99994% confidence).  The Moderna COVID-19 vaccine is reported by the CDC to be 94.1% effective.  These are considered to be standards that are good, but why can’t science ever be pure, i.e. 100% certain.

A portion of the population prefers purity.  It interprets science as being 100% certain, rounding a 99.99994% certainty to 100%.  No scientist will ever say that he is 100% certain. ( if someone claiming to be a scientist does say that he is 100% certain, you can be certain that he is not a scientist).  A vaccination can’t be 100% effective, but we can say that it is better than being 0% effective.  Saying that a vaccine is 94.1% effective also means that it is 5.9% ineffective.  This means that if exposed to the corona virus, there is a 5.9% chance that a person vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine will be infected with the corona virus. This should be applied to whatever the chance that an unvaccinated person will be infected with the virus.  Which is why even those who are vaccinated do not wish to be exposed to the virus. The odds can be increased, but that is all that can be done.  There is a difference between improbable and impossible.

Einstein famously opposed quantum theory and its Heisenberg Uncertainty principle with his phrase “God does not play dice with the universe”.  A person of faith might say that his God constructed the universe so that no human, including the most educated scientist, could ever be 100% certain.  Purity is reserved for the divine.  We can seek to increase our certainty and act accordingly, but it does not appear that we can ever be 100% certain, pure.