Quotes by Robert A. Heinlein on Science and Academic Authority

"The first way to know something is, of course, through personal experience. You know that your living room is painted green because you’ve been in your living room and saw that it was green. (I won’t worry here about things like how you know you aren’t dreaming or insane or such.) Similarly you know what a bird is, how gravity works (again, in an everyday sense), and how to get to the nearest shopping mall, all by direct experience. The second way to know things is by authority. That is, you rely on some source of information, believing it to be reliable, when you have no experience of your own. So almost every person who has gone to school believes that the earth goes around the sun, even though very few people would be able to tell you how anybody could even detect that motion. You are relying on authority if, when asked if you know the way to San Jose, you answer yes and pull out a map. You might be able to personally test the map’s reliability by using it to navigate to San Jose, but until you do you are relying on authority. Many people believe democracy is superior to other forms of government even though they haven’t lived under any other type. They rely on the authority of textbooks and politicians, and perhaps on verbal or pictorial descriptions of what it’s like in other societies. Of course other societies do the same, and most of their defenders rely on authority." Michael J. Behe

"I like to distinguish between the scientific method, which is applied to all materialistic theories. The scientific method is one of observation or experimentation, repeatability, falsification, the repeatability by different techniques of different labs, or prediction and results. It's a scientific method. I say that if it's a non-physical theory, or the theory has any aspect of non-physicalism to it, it doesn't have to be all, any aspect invalidates, to some degree invalidates, the scientific method as I just described from being applicable. And I think there's a tendency in some theories that have some non-physical aspect to try to show their legitimacy by applying the scientific method... I think that's a false desire, because once you're non-physical you are invalidating, to one degree or another, the scientific method. Maybe not totally, but in some degree." Robert Lawrence Kuhn