The main difference between Dr. Marshall and people tha just dismiss science because every once in a while science was wrong is that Dr. Marshall made his experiment, the experiment was replicated, the evidence seemed solid enough to end the dogma and it spread among scientists. The scientific community didn't burn the guy at a stake but gave him the highest recognition.
Before the proof, Marshall and Warren had little more than a suspicion (not enough to topple an accepted theory). Their first H. pilori cultures were in 1982, with little success. Their results of the famous bactery drinking after giving up the culture experiments were published in 1985, only three years later. It's not realistic for a scientist to expect a theory to go away because you have a hunch, even if that hunch turns out to be correct! If anything the Marshall experiment show that in science you can go against the main theories and turn them around if you have proofs.
That's very different that something like "I don't believe in evolution because this sacred book written thousands of years ago says otherwise".
I agree that it's good to be critical of science, but it is also good to be critical our own existing beliefs when they conflict with 95% of the scientific community. For every story like this one, there's a hundred thousand people who are convinced that the world is flat based on YouTube videos that feed their confirmation bias, or poorly designed studies that they lack the academic background to know are poorly designed.
"Settled science" is nothing resembling a homogeneous body of certainty. It's a huge, chaotic mish-mash - of everything from actual rock-solid results, to "it sound reasonable at some point...then human nature took over" baloney. Everybody <cough/>knew<cough/> the latter, so nobody ever carefully checked.
And the worst part? Even long-tenured experts, specializing in the specific scientific niche, seldom know how certain their various facts actually are.
Yes, but science can't "blink" into existence with all proofs already provided. We need to do the work.
We created the scientific method and now we're basing more and more knowledge on demonstrated facts/truths. Some of the knowledge will be invalidated and removed.
In non-science that doesn't happen. In non-science (religion, flat earth, or whatever domain you want), facts/truths only change when a figure of authority orders the change, but even that is problematic and many practitioners will refuse.
We'll never reach a state where all scientific knowledge is demonstrated. Some parts are currently impossible to demonstrate. And even if we could immediately validate everything we know, some new knowlegde can still invalidate old demonstrated knowledge. See newton mechanics vs. relativity. We use the best science that we have.
Science is predicated on healthy skepticism, especially if something has fervent support. Anyone who argues that science is "settled" or that it should be "trusted" is a priest trying to evangelize, not a scientist.
That healthy skepticism likely won't cause any paradigm shifts in most cases, of course, but the point here is that is no reason to surrender the skepticism.
