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Comment by padobson | Hacker News Reader

"But people raised to believe that physicists are more reliable than Hindu priests will prefer molasses to milk. For those who cannot follow the mathematics, belief in the Higgs is an act of faith, not of rationality."

This reminds me of the episode of South Park where Cartman travels into the future to play Nintendo only to find a post-religious world mired in faith-based fighting.

If your quest for understanding takes you down the path of science or of religion or both, at some point you are going to have to take something on faith, and to succeed you will eventually have to defend that faith - usually against someone else's faith in something else.

We all have our cross to bear.

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Science doesn't require you to take anything on faith, for every theory and result it states it gives you the tools and methods to go away and verify it for yourself. It might be a stretch to expect someone to build another LHC, but if they don't trust the science coming out of there they could build it for themselves and see. Faith is the belief in or of something in the absence of proof, science not only provides the proof it makes it possible to prove for yourself. Science only requires trust in the scientists who are providing the results used to prove the theories.

This. This, a thousand times.

Agree 100%. Moreover, any scientific theory is an open challenge. If you can create a reproducible experiment that disproves a theory, then we must throw it away.

We don't throw away useful models, even if they're incomplete.

Science doesn't require you to take anything on faith

But it does, in a sense. See, for example, The Problem of Induction[1].

for every theory and result it states it gives you the tools and methods to go away and verify it for yourself.

The scientific method is certainly my preferred choice for developing new knowledge, and it appears to be better than any other system developed to date (certainly better than accepting weird folklore from ancient books). But, in a manner of speaking, there is a certain sort of "faith" involved with science as well.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

Sure, but science says "I learned it like this, you can learn it this way too."

Religion says "You can't know this. You can't ever know this. You just have to trust me on this."

Absolutely. Don't mistake my comments here as any sort of defense of religion. Just pointing out that science is not, maybe, as absolute as some people would suggest. "Black Swan" events do happen and previously accepted ideas are thrown out.

What makes science so much more compelling than religion, in my book, is the testability. What we think we know about the world, as a result of science, enables us to do things with tangible benefits... cars, computers, jet airplanes, Mars probes, mp3 players, etc. I don't see any way to test much of anything that religion tells us is true. And to the best of my knowledge, when people have tried to validate religious beliefs (like the power of prayer) the results have not come down solidly on the side of religious belief.

There are lots of things that might be true, that you can't prove. String theory, some math problems, the lady or the tiger, whether you can trust your own senses, etc. For any given fact, chances are you can't prove it so you will have to take it on faith or forgo belief.

...at some point you are going to have to take something on faith...

At some point you are going to have to believe that someone else is giving you accurate, verifiable information, and you're going to have to trust them because you don't have the time to actually verify it.

This probably a better articulation of what I mean, though I'm not convinced it's different.

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