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.
Which isn’t an entirely bad thing of course, to have an authority that you respect, believe and obey.
But maybe there’s a line there.
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 guess I will never call me anything else than agnostic, because I never know what people mean with “god” or “belief”.
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.
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.
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 don’t believe science. Science is the process of understanding and learning about 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.
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.
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.
Fossils? Satan put them there to trick you.
Light from billions of light years away? God created it in transit.
Radiometric dating? God just poofed the isotopes to look that way
Nothing is falsifiable when there are all-powerful beings magicking stuff willy nilly.
Young Earth Creationism for instance
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.
Of course the same aguement holds for any creation date and method. I could claim that the world was created last tuesday, or even last second and there would be no way to disprove me. The boltzman brain is the most absurd continuation of this argument.
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.
I mean, who does understand science? It’s incredibly complex.
Still makes more sense than “God did it”, however.
One famous scientist described science as “looking at stuff and talking about it”.
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.
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.
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.
- Do you understand how science works in general and find it a logical way of trying to understand reality? If yes, I don’t think you’re religious.
- Do you believe science is the way because you were told so without questioning it? If yes, you are religious.
Trusting the output of people who have dedicated their lives to seek knowledge and sort understanding from misunderstanding? That’s not near religion.
It is easy enough to be a religious scientist, too. Seeking out “god’s rules for the world” and such.
My point is, the two concepts are wildly different. :)
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?
The process by which scientific knowledge is discovered reliably leads to truth. The process by which religions form doesn’t
Science is the process by which scientific knowledge is discovered? That’s a tight little loop.
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.
The scientific process reliably leads to truth. Charismatic people making shit up and/or hallucinating doesn’t reliably lead to truth, nor does “coalescence of folk beliefs and practices into something more or less organised and more or less useful to the state”
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…
When you believe in things you don’t understand, then you suffer. Superstition ain’t the way.
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.
That would make you dogmatic. But since you’re questioning, then you’re just introspective.
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?
