Lazy politicians like science because it means that they don’t have to ‘do politics’(see: Why stupid lazy politicians like science.) Science can save them from having to reconcile competing interests, make choices or show leadership. With science politicians can simply shrug and say ‘it’s out of my hands, it’s science’. Even better they can say, ‘you can’t argue with this, it’s science’. So lazy politicians are wont to stretch the definition of science to include ideas that aren’t actually science so these ideas can also benefit from the rhetorical power of science. Lazy, stupid politicians don’t even notice they are doing it.
Eventually we end up with the ‘The public relations definition of science', which says science is everything that’s right and everything that’s right is science. There’s room for just about everything in this view of science. But as a result, little remains of what makes science special. Once the public relations definition of science takes hold, genuine science, which really does give us reliable and robust knowledge about the world that can only be challenged with enormous effort, then looks just like any other opinion that can be easily dismissed.
Science is special – not universal – and don’t let any lazy politician tell you otherwise. The worst crime against science is to equate it with rationality because doing so robs science of everything that makes it special. Science is not truth or reason, and it is not ‘the world’. Rather, it is a system that allows us to be confident about some ideas about the world. There are other ideas about the world that we can be confident about for other reasons, but the particular way we can be confident about scientific ideas makes science unique.
According to the public relations definition of science, if it’s right then it’s science. This could not be more wrong. Right aint got nothing to do with it (if I told you that there is a planet larger than Mercury beyond the orbit of Pluto I might be right, but it’s not science.) Only a small set of ideas about the world can be considered scientific. Most rational thought is unscientific and that’s fine. Unscientific is not the same as irrational. There are very few occasions when 'unscientific' should be considered an insult.