In our modern, enlightened era we romanticize about the strength and truth of science. For many of us, she stands as a sort of silent arbiter to our reasoning that, like Lady Justice, is blind to human passions and bias.

Being a chemical engineering student and more fully aware of her grand contributions to society than most of the public — as are most engineers — I, of all people, have sat mesmerized by her wonder and depth since my childhood.

But for all her grandeur, she has her limits, and the public seems woefully unaware of what they are and why they exist.

This may seem like an engineer nit-picking, but I assure you that a lack of understanding concerning the nature of science may undermine our reasoning at worst, and at best, allow us to be manipulated by those who do understand it. While the contributions of science and her history are studied well and completely in our public schools, precious little time is spent discussing the meaning of the scientific method.

The scientific method is often summed up in a few simple steps: Ask a question, formulate a hypothesis, test your hypothesis, repeat your test, draw conclusions and repeat if necessary with a new hypothesis.

This method is the benchmark of scientific reasoning. It is meant to stand as the proof of the truth of an idea in relation to the natural world. If the hypothesis fails to predict the results of the experiment many times, we may conclude that it is not true. If the next hypothesis tested accurately predicts the result of our experiment, we take it to be true.

This is fine, but what the scientific method has not done is guaranteed the uniqueness of that truth; that is to say, we are not certain that this hypothesis is the only one that explains the results of our experiment.

This attribute is far from critical insofar as science is pursued for the sake of understanding the natural world, but the reality and mendacity of our humanity causes this to be a central point of contention in modern societal issues.

In essence, science is a philosophical sausage grinder. The hypothesis that gets put in the grinder appears in the sausage, proven or dis-proven. As humans, we choose the ingredients of our intellectual sausage. We spice it with political implications and philosophical biases and pump it neatly into the skin of scientific study, and then dare to claim it is unbiased science, a reflection of the natural world.

We need only examine myriad core political issues to notice this manipulation of truth. Research may be conducted based on a hypothesis chosen not for the sake of understanding our natural world, but for pushing political or social agenda.

If the hypothesis formed by the scientists were contrary to a political or social climate it would not receive funding and remain unproven, and therefore untrue. A simple example of this occurs in our views of race.

It is common to classify micro-organisms by genotype with the goal of understanding behavioral differences. This information may then be used to identify a genotype based on an observed behavior rather than genetic testing. Humorously, we might imagine applying such an experiment to humans, but of course it will never occur, because funding such a project would forever label the supposedly impartial scientific institution that undertook the study as racist.

The understanding of the nature of our biology has become second in importance to societal qualms and perceptions. Scientific inquiry into climate change, alternative energy, the origins of life and biological evolution are all subject to the political climate in which we reside.

Perhaps our generation will have to step forward and demand as much a separation of scientific research and government as our forefathers did of the state and their religion.

Aside from sociopolitical manipulation, science is continually used to justify or rationalize particular ethical or moral outlooks whereupon she ought to be silent. Simply put, if something is not experimentally testable, science will have no bearing on it.

This seems obvious, but we often hear people suggest that science bears relevance in such things as societal ethics and morals. Certainly the converse is true: ethics must be a part of scientific experimentation, but the notion that science should govern ethics, or any other branch of philosophy, is ridiculous. What would it look like to test ethics scientifically?

Let us perform a thought experiment and apply this notion to a simple ethical question: Is killing a 5-year-old child wrong?

Our hypothesis is that it is indeed wrong to murder children 5 years of age. We might begin by getting a large group of children, say 100, that are as similar as possible. Clones would be preferable. We could then shoot them one by one. After each dead child we could look for evidence for the wrongness of the activity — I doubt if wrongness can be found under a microscope, but for the sake of argument we will assume it can be observed — and then analyze the results statistically.

We may find that 83 percent of the time shooting a child of 5 years is wrong. We publish our research so that someone somewhere else may repeat our experiment and verify our results.

We have now made one solid ethical decision scientifically.

Since science may test only one variable at a time; we will have to repeat it on different ages, races and genders of children to draw accurate ethical conclusions in a broad spectrum of child murder.

Sound insane? It is. Yet we hear from some that science should dictate and drive the decisions of our nation.

Science is no substitute for human judgment, and by its nature it never will be. Science sits a tier below philosophy and strategy. The questions of our reason and our philosophy will never be encompassed by the scientific method.

Science is truly one of the greatest accomplishments of the human race. It stands rivaled perhaps only by the written word itself, but as citizens and as thinkers we owe to ourselves to keep our science concerned with the testable and our hypotheses as true and impartial as we may.

As informed Americans, we owe it to ourselves to take a critical look at how science is used in the power structure of our nation and how it plays as much a role in shaping our thoughts as it does improving our quality of life.