What is Science (according to Kevin Lyon)

Kevin Lyon is a Professor in the Science department at Jones County Junior College, Ellisville, MS. He was interviewed in an episode of the "You are not so Smart" podcast about the misuse of "common sense" to understand the world. Towards the end of the podcast, the host, David McRaney, asked him for his brief "go-to" definition of science. His response was something like this:

1. It's a way of knowing things that is characterized by objectivity, absence of bias towards one answer over another, of restriction to empiricism. This makes it unable to answer some of our dearest questions. Science can provide very little help in answering questions that cannot be addressed empirically (like life after death). Science can't explore those kinds of questions because they are not subject to empirical analysis. That's not to say that all things outside the empirical realm don't exist - just that science can't treat them.
2. It's characterized by the use of certain rules of logic. You have to use appropriate deductive reasoning, or if you use inductive reasoning you should rely on Occam's Razor (parsimony).
3. The hypotheses that you investigate have to be disprovable, and the conclusions you draw based on the data you get must be tentative. Science doesn't seek to "prove" hypotheses, but only to disprove them (or show them to be very unlikely to be true). Science tries not to use the word, "prove", with respect to theories and hypotheses. Instead it frames conclusions like, "the data we have collected supports this or that conclusion". To say that something has been "proved" lacks tentativeness so necessary to good science, and the ego gets involved. When the ego is involved, it is difficult to let go of old conclusions in the face of new evidence.
4. A person taking a scientific approach to understanding the world maintains a skeptical attitude. Don't rely on authority, but on evidence. Don't buy into an idea unless you have a good reason to do so.