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.
In the case of science, the claims made are disprovable, but have not been despite many attempts. For example, if you want to see if light is a wave, you can do the double slit experiment with a laser pointer, a piece of wire, and some black tape: Tape the wire over the output in the center of the beam, and then use more tape strips parallel to the wire to create 2 narrow slits. Then shine the laser with the tape and wire on a wall a few meters away. Assuming light is composed of waves, you will an interference pattern consisting of a line dots instead a single dot or line. (Try it!) The same will happen for all forms of electromagnetic radiation, including radio waves, infrared, UV, and even X-rays. Even if you personally have not done many experiments, millions of other people have, verifying that the theories hold over almost any conceivable situation.
The claims made by religion are, if anything more believable, but impossible to disprove and therefor, no one has been been able to try. There is no experiment or observation for the existence of a god, or a soul.
There is a big difference between believing in empirically demonstrated facts and something that no one is able to check.
Some claims by religion are absolutely falsifiable. Young Earth Creationism for instance. There are plenty of ways to show the earth is just a smidge older than ~6000 years old. By smidge I mean like orders of magnitude older.
No, not really. They can and will claim that any evidence you present was created by God some 6,000 years ago. If you assume a creator (God in this case) that can create anything for any reson, their is no way to prove that the world was not created 6,000 years ago.
Fossils? God created them in rocks 6,000 years ago. Radioisotope dating? created that way. 20,000 year old archeological site? created that way.
But that doesn’t make the claim itself not falsifiable. They just “prove” it’s true with bullshit. And the fact that it has absolutely been proven false means it’s falsifiable.
This is where I’ve found most issues with idiots championing such idiocy. They don’t understand the topics they try to argue.
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 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..
There hasn’t been a single person in human history who understood everything.
All of science is a collaboration, where individuals specialise in fields, biology, physics, archeology, psychology, chemistry, etc.
The fields interact, proven things from one helping prove things from another. Scientists may occasionally re-confirm previously proven things, re-investigation consensus…
But no one person alone has ever run the gauntlet of putting reality through the scientific method, going from basic observation, all the way to advanced proofs out to the frontiers of what is known about all things.
Chemists don’t need to start at proving that atoms and molecules exist, they can simply hit the ground running believing something that was confirmed by past scientists.
If at some point the proven assumptions fail to predict reality, only then is there a need to re-examine what was made known by those who came before.
That you accept science, but do not understand it, is merely to stand at the starting point at which all science today is advanced from. You are not a scientist, you do not need to continue walking forwards from that line, nor examine the paths of generations past that took you there.
But regardless of your understanding, scientific consensus can show you where the line is right now, and you have a right to stand on it same as anyone else. Doing so is not faith, it is step one in exploring reality by standing upon the shoulders of generations past.
Beautifully said! I was going to say something along the lines of science is the belief/ trust in man, while religion is the belief/ trust in a deity but I believe this is better.
Wasn’t it Isaac Newton who said something along the lines of “If I have seen farther than anyone before me, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants”.
And that was nearly 400 years ago, when knowledge was so much more limited and narrow in scope than today.
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.
I think there’s a big difference between knowing that answers exist and with time, energy and resources you could learn them, but it’s just too impractical to do it all, and blindly accepting that no one has the capacity to know something.
Plus, science backs up claims with evidence, experiments and data, and, at least to some capacity, a layman can parse that information. Fundamentally, science is provable, even if you won’t get 100% of it. Religion is strictly founded in the fact that no one is capable of parsing anything it teaches.
The key concept here is belief without understanding.
That’s part of it, but not all of it.
If you look at definitions of religious:
having a strong belief in a god or gods
a · the service and worship of God or the supernatural ; b · belief in or devotion to religious faith or observance ; c · the state of a person in the religious life.
Belief in science does not require a belief in a god or gods.
It does not require the worship of god or the “supernatural” - a healthy fascination is plenty, but optional.
It does not require devotion to anything.
Science is the best we can explain the world around us, and if old theories are proven wrong, it’s not infallible- we simply accept new knowledge with an open mind. Religion tends to do the opposite and deny it.
So no, you may or may not be religious, but a belief in science has nothing to do with it.
Having grown up in a religious household, these definitions seem more restrictive to me that they should be. Religious people see religious behavior even where there is no supernatural god involved. In their eyes, the god of an atheist soccer fan is soccer, and they see much of his behavior as just as religious as theirs. In that world view, it’s just the question of a false or true god.
And from that point of view OP’s question is very very valid.
Religious people see religious behavior even where there is no supernatural god involved. In their eyes, the god of an atheist soccer fan is soccer, and they see much of his behavior as just as religious as theirs.
When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To the atheist soccer fan, they’re enjoying the sport, but I think it’s a stretch to say they are enjoying it to the extent of “worship” in the same way a Christian does God. Even the most religious people I’ve known were allowed to enjoy things, watch sports, , appreciate good food, etc. and it was fine if they didn’t “put it before God”.
In OP’s case we don’t know if they have any ties to a religion, so I suppose that context is what matters most to answer their question. To me, an atheist, they are not being religious by believing science. To a fundamental Christian, that belief in science could be enough to say they are in service of a false god.
I agree. It’s very subjective and depends who you are talking to.
I’m somewhat wary of calling myself an atheist, because I am not necessarily against religion (unless it is harming others - otherwise I think it can help some people, and that is great), even though I don’t follow any myself. Some people may interpret the term as being against it, and that is the case for some atheists, of course. But I do identify with the term more than agnostic, because while I acknowledge I can never know for sure, personally I am very doubtful.
I think you’re using the terms “religion” and “faith” interchangeably. And while faith is a key component in religion, religion is not a key component in faith.
You’re focused on one similarity between religion and science and framing it as the core of each system. Religion is fundamentally based on belief. Religious texts and belief systems can be complex, well researched, and well thought out, but if you pick a belief and try to follow its roots you will eventually reach a dead end.
Science is fundamentally different. Every single scientific “belief” is backed by rigorous evidence and open to criticism. If you distrust a claim you are free and encouraged to demonstrate it to be false. The only ultimate authority in science is the behavior of the universe.
Scientists, like all humans, are prone to make errors or deceive others for personal gain. But their lies or mistakes are always corrected eventually. You are not asked to believe in science, or to believe the claims of any individual scientists. You are encouraged to learn about the scientific method and how scientists apply it. To learn that many things have been repeatedly demonstrated to be truths of the universe and that many things are unknown. Every day humans use their knowledge to try and make new discoveries, or to expand or correct previous discoveries.
There is not a single “belief” in science that you are expected to take at face value, no authority that you are expected to believe or obey. You are free to come to your own conclusions about anything you want.
The reason most people collectively “believe in science” is because it is overwhelming, you cannot ignore the human progress that science has achieved.