What do you mean by you don’t understand science? Like you don’t understand the process by which scientific knowledge is aquired? Or you don’t understand the mechanisms behind things like biology or physics? Or something else?
You’re falling prey to a common trope from religionists: an ambiguous usage of the word/concept “belief.”
I trust what experts in fields outside those I’m deeply familiar with because generally speaking people like them have gone to the trouble of demonstrating what they claim is actually true in the past. That makes it rational, in my opinion, to trust claims that they make today and in the future within their field of expertise.
So to some extent I get the religious commitment of people who have directly experienced what they consider to be miracles. It’s rational, in a way, to become religious after experiencing what you consider to be a miracle.
The vast majority of religious people have not directly experienced a miracle the way I’ve directly performed scientific experiments that validate others’ reported results. They’ve heard about miracles. They’ve read about miracles. That’s not the same, and I’d argue it makes their religious beliefs irrational.
Now, what would probably happen if people were only religious after directly experiencing miracles? I bet religions would just fade away and eventually people who experienced “miracles” would instead contemplate then as unexplained phenomena that could probably have AB explanation rooted in the physical world, and also but become religious.
In a world where religion is encouraged and celebrated, of course people who experience what they consider to be a miracle will first turn to a religious explanation. But if we imagine no religion…
So let me get this straight, Mr. Dope… You get your information from a book written by men you’ve never met, and you take their words as truth, based on a willingness to believe, a desire to accept, a leap of… of, dare I say it?
Personally, I think this is a meaningless question. For me it’s all about utility. I’ve found science to provide utility to me in helping understand and, more importantly, predict the world. I’ve not found the same in religion. I choose paths that provide utility.
There is a subtle but critical difference between belief in science and belief in religion.
Religion - Trust and have faith.
Science - Trust but verify.
I’ve got significant training in science. Even I can’t follow and verify every advance in every field. I have to trust that they are applying the scientific method properly.
That trust is backed with teeth however. If needed, I can bring myself up to speed in a field. I can verify what they claim makes sense. I can also (in theory) run the same experiments to test their work.
Further to that, I know other scientists are doing exactly that. Both in the form of reading the paper, with a sufficient knowledge base to criticise it, and by repeating the actual experiment. This discourages fraud, as well as weeding out poor research.
On top of all this, science forms a web. No scientific theory, work or idea stands in isolation, they all interlink. Because of this, once you have enough knowledge, you can often spot the mismatched strands. These indicate one of 2 things. Either that particular paper is wrong, or something very interesting is going on. Either way, it’s worth some more attention. This is how many scientists can dismiss poor or controversial “research”. It mismatches with well verified work, and doesn’t have the data to back up such a mistake being the case.
This web is the basis of scientific consensus. The consensus is the current best understanding of the universe that we have. We know it’s not correct however, it has flaws. As science works, those flaws get filled in. Eventually, some of them get enough weight of research and data that they become accepted as part of the consensus. Very rarely, entire areas of the web get shown to be false (or more generally incomplete). This can lead to large and rapid changes to our understanding. These are extremely rare however, and not something to be accepted lightly.
I want to add a fundamental difference in the way science and religion handle being proven wrong: In science I would say that the only “fundamental truth” is “anything and everything I think I know could be wrong”. In religion it’s the polar opposite: “What I believe is the truth, the whole truth and the only truth”.
Thus, when a scientific theory is shown to not match reality, that doesn’t challenge a scientist’s fundamental world view, in fact it backs it up.
To me, that is what fundamentally separates science from other approaches to understanding the world (i.e. religion): If your most basic truth is that you can never truly know anything for sure, then no evidence can ever come into conflict with you world view. This leads scientists to accept new models and evidence, while religions prefer to reject evidence.
Why does it matter to you, if that makes you religious? The understanding of “religious” from the point of view of an atheist is different than from a theist to begin with.
Believing in things we don’t understand is the normal human behavior. Everyone, including Carl Sagan, must believe in things they doesn’t understand, to live their life. That in itself is not a problem.
The difference between problematic belief and live-your-life belief is how you react when you have to confront a misunderstanding of a previous belief. Will you change your belief, or do you dogmatically stick to it?
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.
You don’t believe science. Science is the process of understanding and learning the universe. There is nothing to believe. If you agree you agree, if you disagree you prove otherwise. No dogmatism, rituals, beliefs, traditions are present unlike religions. So apples to oranges.
You can also choose to understand science if you invest enough time. You cannot, for example, see a god if you work hard. Again, apples to oranges.
That’s where the scientific consensus comes in. It’s the latest group understanding.
On climate change, well over 99% of scientists agree it’s man made, and a serious issue. The only debate is over how bad it will be. All the controversy comes from either political or religious individuals, or from big oil funded scientists.
A good example of this process working is the room temperature superconductor paper, that recently made the news. Multiple groups immediately tried to verify it. Unfortunately, none could. The paper either missed critical information, making it useless, or was fraudulent. This was all before it was even “published”, and so subject to peer review.
I never said that the consensus was always correct. It can be wrong, in both large and small ways. Its use here is for a layman looking in. The stronger the consensus, the more sure about the answer the community as a whole is.
I mainly brought it up as a counter to the common “both sides” thing that the media loves to do. They love creating controversy where there is almost none left.
Btw, if you provide some examples, I’d be happy to help analyze the type of failure involved. It could be enlightening to other readers.
Yes there is. Plenty of experiments require millions to billions of dollars in capital to make the same observations that you are trusting scientists to be honest about. This is a cope take. There is plenty of blind trust in the way the general public understands science.