I believe science because I understand science, and I’m also religious. So no, it doesn’t work like that lol. It’s not one or the other. It’s two different ways of making sense of the world that should only be applied to the arenas of life that are within their scope.
Here’s the thing about science: If you had the ability to purge all knowledge of all science, written, in people’s memories, etc. then over time we woul relearn it all pretty much exactly the same. It may take centuries, and what we know today as Pythagoras’ Theorem or Einstein’s theory of relativity would likely have different names for them. But the underlying science behind them will be 100% identical once they are “re”-discovered. Everything we know today about math, physics, electronics, etc. will eventually be relearned.
The same can’t be said for any religion. Wipe out ALL knowledge of all religions and new ones will spring up with completely new stories to try to explain beliefs to groups of people.
I certainly don’t have an understanding of how many aspects of science works but I trust it. I trust all the science that goes into making my car operate safely. I trust the science that makes my smartphone and the internet work. I trust the medical science that cured my dad of cancer and healed my brother after a bad accident. I trust all the science involved in providing safe food and water for many millions of people.
i dont think intelligence is necessarily what you know.. its what/who you choose as your 'information proxy'. as we all cannot know everything, we purposefully or sometimes not, choose an information proxy for a specific domain of information.
i would say only religious folks would choose other religious folks/religions as their information source..
Let’s be more exact. There’s the scientific process and then there’s the result of science.
The scientific process encourages further study and research. It’s based upon facts. Our view of the world changes with more discoveries. That’s what you believe in, right?
The result of science is immense. You might study one part but have no exposure/interest in another part. Because you accept the scientific process, you can accept the results in other areas without it being a religion.
Contrast that with religion: it doesn’t tolerate questions because it has no factual answers. The process is to just blindly accept whatever the holy person/scripture says. We can see around us now how well that is going.
I think its important for all people to understand a few important fundimentals of science and its grounding in physical reality. But there’s only so much time in the day and unless you have a real interest or profession in science its reasonable to just accept conventional answers. Its not the same thing as hard blind faith that religions sometimes ask for. Its taking an academic experts opinion at face value.
Its also important to understand that there are limits to provability/falsifiability which science relies on. or put more simply, not all things that are true can be proveable. There’s some aspects of to the human experience, and reality as a whole, that science will forever reject out due to its need for hard falsifyable truths within a working model. Science isn’t an answer to everything, just the hows and sometimes if were really lucky why’s of physical aspects to reality.
Nope. The only thing that would make you religious is belief in a god, or some form of supernatural order governing the universe and, generally, superseding all phenomena described by science.
More to the point, I’ll bet there is SOME science you understand. You understand that if you hold out a ball in your hand and then open your hand, the ball falls. You might not even know this is called “gravity” (although you probably do), but you still understand scientifically that A follows B. Science is just a theory (predictive framework: the knowledge that the ball will fall when you open your hand) tied to observation (you’ve dropped lots of things before, and saw what happened).
And here’s the thing: even if you were the world’s foremost expert on the science of gravity, there will still be vast swaths of established science that you don’t understand. Probably most of it! You would understand a lot of things related to gravity, and a smaller number of things related to physics and/or astrophysics, you would probably understand a lot of the math; but the further you get away from your speciality of gravity, the fuzzier things are for you. Nobody understands it all, there’s too much. So in that sense, when you say “I don’t understand science”, I think you really mean “I don’t specialize in any particular kind of science because my existence doesn’t require it, so there’s a lot of it that doesn’t make sense to me.” And you share the former property with most people on earth, and the latter property with literally everyone on earth. Not all of whom are religious.
In parting, I’d like to point out that lots and lots of people who understand various scientific fields very well, are nevertheless also religious. The two things aren’t necessarily related, it’s only time and politics that makes it seems as though they are in opposition.