Check out this article about The Limits of Science. This is as close as you’re going to get to straight talk about the strengths and weaknesses of science. Anthony Gottlieb, the ex-executive editor at The Economist who penned the article, starts off with the highest praise possible:

There is, or should be, no mystery about why it is always more rational to believe in science than in anything else, because this is true merely by definition. What makes a method of enquiry count as scientific is not that it employs microscopes, rats, computers or people in stained white coats, but that it seeks to test itself at every turn. If a method is as rigorous and cautious as it can be, it counts as good science; if it isn’t, it doesn’t.

“It is always more rational to believe in science than in anything else.” Tough to follow up as sentence like that but Gottlieb does by going in the opposite direction–going through the important faults of science including the difficulty scientists have in admitting when they’re wrong:

When scientists confront the deniers of evolution, or the devotees of homeopathic medicine, or people who believe that childhood vaccinations cause autism—all of whom are as demonstrably mistaken as anyone can be—they understandably fight shy of revealing just how riddled with error and misleading information the everyday business of science actually is.

The fact that much of what we believe today might be disproved tomorrow:

If the past is any guide—and what else could be?—plenty of today’s science will be discredited in future. There is no reason to think that today’s practitioners are uniquely immune to the misconceptions, hasty generalisations, fads and hubris that marked most of their predecessors.

The big problems that exist with peer review, science’s self-regulating mechanism where researchers have their work scrutinized by competing researchers:

Most laymen probably assume that the 350-year-old institution of “peer review”, which acts as a gatekeeper to publication in scientific journals, involves some attempt to check the articles that see the light of day. In fact they are rarely checked for accuracy, and, as a study for the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think-tank, reported last year, “the data and computational methods are so seldom disclosed that post-publication verification is equally rare.”

The problem of the press overreacting to new discoveries:

It is perhaps the biases of science reporting in the popular press that produce the most misinformation, especially in medicine. The faintest whiff of a breakthrough treatment for a common disease is news, yet the fact that yesterday’s breakthrough didn’t pan out—which ought to be equally interesting to a seeker after truth—rarely is.

All this should leave you asking, “why should I believe anything a scientist says then?” Then Gottlieb hammers you with this:

Happily, there is another way out of the impasse between fallible science and even-more-fallible non-science. The contest is not a zero-sum game: the shortcomings of science do not make it rational to believe cranks instead.

In short, we should always look at science with a critical eye, parsing the wheat from the chaff (which is time consuming), but in the end, even when science makes mistakes that doesn’t mean someone else holds the truth. The unfortunate reality is maybe no one does.

And, to lighten things up a bit, here’s another difference between scientists and “normal” people from this morning’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: