Our metaphysics prof promised to award an F on any test paper that used a strawman.
Mine had a particular dislike for any statement that starts with "It is intuitively obvious that..."
That is not a strawman argument (its an observation), nor is it an attack on actual scientific method. To the contrary, I'm no Luddite, and would love to have scientific method followed very strictly. I made an observation that scientists like to sound certain, when they don't really have definitive proof. I'll stand by that.
Scientific presumption in astronomy is really fairly harmless, but in other fields it has opened Pandora's box, to make things that aren't definite whatever the majority would like them to be. Which is bad for science, and when it supports a political agenda or to suck up grant money, bad for us all.
It is all well and good to say 'just show scientific proof to the contrary', but when there is none to be had, that's pretty hard. e.g. Global warming computer models are absolute nonsense, but a majority of the scientific world has agreed to go with it. So how do I refute their computer model? They've created evidence, because no real evidence is available. I could create my own flawed model, but I wouldn't be using science, and it would come back to how the majority feels, vice any scientific proof.
To combat this decline of real science, I would like to start forcing scientists to say the words, "We don't really know, but..." when they don't really know. The things that are actually known (distance of the Sun, composition of the atmosphere) should be presented differently than theories on why the dinosaurs went extinct, why Johnny misbehaves, etc.