The cult of science
reddit.com
reddit.com
If someone questions your beliefs, saying you have no reason to believe them, a common thing to fall back to is that you believe them on faith. There are lots of ways to argue against that from a rational point of view, such as by showing they could just as easily believe on faith an opposing view, but the believer doesn't even need to entertain those arguments if they simply say 'but your beliefs are based on faith as well'.
Similarly, if you can convince someone that they believe 'science' on faith, it becomes easier to stretch that to have them believe other things on faith.
It's not always obvious when someone is believing some thing about the world, claiming they believe it because 'science', if they believe it on faith or not. This is why I think the 'faith based science' arguments have been so successful.
For me the counterargument to 'belief in science is on faith, too' is fairly simple, and comes in two parts.
- No idea of 'science' is held sacred, and will be replaced as soon as we have reason to replace it. Science changes its ideas to fit the world. Faith ignores the world when those ideas are contradicted.
- No authority of 'science' is held sacred, assumed to be infallible or incomprehensible. Whenever science makes a claim it is possible to verify that claim and the assumptions the claim builds upon. Any faith based claim eventually reduces to 'because this thing/person claimed it' - often a specific person or book.
It's not that faith in science is wrong (it's the best tool we have available right now), but that the way many people treat science is exactly the same way they would have treated religion if they were fervently religious. They didn't pick up the skepticism and rationalism that's meant to come with a scientific mindset, it's just "science TV man says X so X is true". We even get cargo cult science on HN (not a big surprise given this place is just a more formal reddit) where people demand a citation to a journal to back up arguments, but if one is provided the argument is dead in the water because the requester has no idea how to read the jargon of the field 9/10 times.
To extend my point a bit further, my argument is that even if you treat science exactly the same as a religion - for all the points you mention and more - it is still fundamentally different to a faith based belief. That is, even if people treat it like religion it is fundamentally different to pretty much every other religion we have.
That doesn't hold completely. I think the two points I said differentiate science from faith still hold; ideas are fallible, and authorities are fallible. It does seem that some people to not treat them as such, the 'atheist televangelist' being a great example. So sometimes people and ideas are held up as 'correct by definition'.
I think, and perhaps this is tenuous, that even in these situations where people are playing out the cult of science we still have far better footing than the analogy with faith based beliefs would imply.
Science is trying to be correct. If a person or an idea is so popular that they persist in the face of evidence, eventually they will change. If nothing else, the person will die or the people who believe the idea will die, and the more correct ideas will win out. I'm a little more optimistic, and think people like Nye and Tyson will change their positions if they're shown to be wrong.
There is no underlying thing that you must believe to be true in order to believe in science, and if pressed I like to think anyone who believes something 'because science' will change their mind on pretty much anything if given enough evidence.
Unfortunately Science becomes a tool for so many things, and so people who believe things because politics, but hide behind a smokescreen of 'Science!' will maybe never change their minds. Tribalism is a really powerful thing, and we'll probably have to continue relearning that old lesson that the truth of a matter is not determined by if we feel it is true, nor that it is true because someone agrees with us.
as for the second part of your argument, yes HN does get some ignorant arguments but that is the price of becoming more popular - you attract people from all segments of the technically inclined population.
this is yet another "the popular thing of the day is actually bad coz human beings are stupid and do not seek out opposing viewpoints" argument thread
Whenever someone says they believe in something because science they are agreeing to change their mind when shown to be incorrect.
In reality people are stubborn or lazy, so there are lots of things slipping through that shouldn't. There's an analogy to be drawn here with crypto algorithms.
Almost everyone uses specific crypto algorithms because some expert decided they were the best ones to use. It's generally considered best practice to use open-source algorithms, not because we can prove they are more secure than closed-source algorithms, but because we are able to investigate them ourselves. At no point does it become a pure faith exercise, trust me because I said so, but it's a verifiable trust, trust me but feel free to check my work.
There are many many things I believe essentially because everyone else believes them too, but as long as I am able to verify them (and approach the belief with an appropriate amount of scepticism) I don't think that falls in to cultish behaviour.
To try and finish this thought, I think things drift into the cultish when everybody believes the same thing and are either unable to or choose not to validate that it's actually true. We should encourage people to be more skeptical of any claim, but especially ones that are justified by 'Science!', but not confuse that with being unable to validate the claim at all.
> Yes, the conflation between atheism and science is very frustrating, and harmful to science's image.
In particular, this attitude seems to be prevalantly American. Being an atheist carries less of a stigma outside the US, and the correlation between scientific understanding and a tendency to irreligious beliefs is taken for granted.