Science takes as much faith as religion


kausawolf's avatar
I heard this saying the other day, thought it could spark an interesting debate on here.
Thoughts?
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Toadsanime's avatar
There's no debate, that's just simply silly. Science isn't based on the faith of anything, it's based on evidence, testing and study.
kausawolf's avatar
Have you done the testing personally yourself?
Toadsanime's avatar
No. Are you implying that I have faith because I have faith in that the scientists aren't all just part of a conspiracy to blaspheme God and are in fact lying to us?
kausawolf's avatar
I'm implying that unless you've done every scientific experiment yourself, you have faith that they are presenting the facts to you completely and without tainting them.
Just like salmon with faith believes their priest/pastor is presenting them the correct facts, you have faith in the scientists to present you the correct facts.
Toadsanime's avatar
Except from that a scientist really doesn't have any reason to lie about what they've discovered and they don't just make wild claims without explaining them and showing the evidence of it.
kausawolf's avatar
As far as you know.
I think your just arguing because you don't want to just accept you have faith in somefin.
Toadsanime's avatar
As far as I know they have no reason to lie and explain/show evidence of their findings? No, the difference here is rationally and logically there is no reason for them to lie about what they've found. To suggest otherwise is just to have doubt in science over some ridiculous, unfounded and illogical conspiracy. Scientists do show their evidence for what they're claiming and they do explain it -- there's no debate to this. If any new discovery is made and reported, an explanation for it and/or evidence is always given. Always. If not, the claim does not get made because that's not how science work. Science is not some big, strange conspiracy.

I really just don't view it as a blind faith in the same vain as religion.
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Debit's avatar
Lump together a body of scientific community, then also lump together a body of theological community, and they are functionally not that different from one another: Dogma. Faith comes into play, because of the institutional need to support dogma. A scientific upstart is going to have just as hard time selling his alternative ideas as his theological counterpart. While bad theology is entirely possible, so can bad science. (A very good example of bad science today can be seen from dogma found in obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases.) Bear in mind that both pursuits are conducted by people and thus will carry over their peculiarities like cherry-picking.
poseidonsimons's avatar
science is based on observation, hypothesis, experiment, confirmation/rejection
religion is based on observation, goddidit, the end
kausawolf's avatar
Think about it this way.
A priest tells us, "God did this" and since none of us saw it for ourselves, we believe it.

A scientist tells us, "Science did this" and since none of us did the experiment ourselves, we believe it.
While science has tests to back everything up, you have no idea if the people who did those tests are credible. You have to have faith in them to not lie, to not make human error.
Unless you are doing the tests yourself, you put faith into the people who do.
mimer's avatar
This is such a bullshit argument.

This only works if you expand the term faith to cover both religious faith, which is blind faith, as well as meaningfor example with the theory of evolution, trusting in the repeated verifiable and peer reviewed, documented results and practical applications of scientific research by an enormous amount of scientifically trained individuals and teams crosschecking eachothers findings and expanding on them, correcting mistakes over a myriad of fields from genetics, biochemistry to paleontology, geology etc going back 150 years to form the strongest scientific theory we have.

And the best part is, anyone can check the results out and repeat the exeriments if they want to, since it's all documented.

If your argument is that the word "faith" covers both of these things, then good for you :) then faith covers two gargantunaly different concepts.
kausawolf's avatar
:3 No need to be rude.
mimer's avatar
There's also no need to make fallacious arguments like that, and yet some people do.
kausawolf's avatar
Hm, I'd hate to think that way.
DOTB18's avatar
Except science holds up under scrutiny. "God did it" does not.
kausawolf's avatar
Your still putting faith into science.
How whale either holds up isn't the topic.
DOTB18's avatar
I think you're confusing "reasonable expectations based on experience and evidence" with "absolute conviction regardless of evidence".

I have trust in science, because scientists show their work for all who wish to see, and their work has real world application (otherwise we wouldn't have medicine, Internet, space travel, etc.).

Religious leaders, however, practically demand that you gullibly take their word at face value, and when their claims are investigated, it turns out they have nothing to show for it.

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MagusTheLofty's avatar
Pretty much, this.
kitsumekat's avatar
It does. You need faith in both.
Smkiller's avatar
The faith in science is different from the faith in religion, and it's hardly the same ammount.
kitsumekat's avatar
Not really per say. Most people have faith in both religion and science. In fact most of the scientist who brought us a lot of the science we used today were religious.
Smkiller's avatar
My statement makes no claims about religious scientists. I'm saying that they are both different kinds and amounts of faiths.
kitsumekat's avatar
Dpends actually.
abeautiful-world's avatar
Science takes as much faith as religion

I said this on a forum the other day so I don't know if you heard it via me or someone else.

But I said it because I believe the secret to true knowledge is knowing that you know nothing.

Now that might not appear to make sense at first as you clearly know we need to breath oxygen to live right?
But what if there really is life after death? Are soul would live on when are body is starved of oxygen.

So this basic concept is designed to show
That every thing you ever learn (in science) while you are on this planet, is only based on the environment around you and the current technology you poses to investigate that environment.

This is because science uses the highest technology available to investigate the world and its laws them makes theory's about why it happens in the environment.

However these theory's are just the current beliefs.
when new technologies become available they could actually turn out to be wrong

but just like any belief system many people convince themselves that what they have read in a text book has so much evidence to support it that it must be a fact.
So these people now believe in something that may or may not be true.


or to put it simpler everything you where ever taught in science is based on your current level of technology, the environment you live in and the rules that environment follows.

However if something was to change to any one of them things everything you know would change.

To explain this in better detail let me point out the The Expanding Earth theory

A good number of scientists subscribed (believed) that the Earth was forever increasing in volume. The expanding Earth hypothesis stated that phenomena like underwater mountain ranges and continental drift could be explained by the fact that the planet was gradually growing larger. As the globe’s size grew, proponents argued, the distances between continents would increase, as would the Earth’s crust, which would have explained the creation of new mountains. The theory has a long and storied past, beginning with Darwin, who briefly tinkered with it before casting it aside, and Nikola Tesla, who compared the process to that of the expansion of a dying star.

This expanding Earth hypothesis has never been proven wrong exactly, but it has been widely replaced with the much more sophisticated theory of plate tectonics. While the expanding Earth theory holds that all land masses were once connected, and that oceans and mountains were only created as a result of the planet’s growing volume, plate tectonics explains the same phenomena by way of plates in the lithosphere that move and converge beneath the Earth’s surface.

So as scientists found out new things about the environment they live in this theory seemed less and less likely and there belief has now changed.