Hyperspace Fool said:
Religion doesn't even have to be classical for me to see it this way. I view Capitalism and Science as modern religions with their own impressive temples. Skyscrapers, CERN, SETI sites etc. They may be more practical currently, and less archaic certainly... but the invisible hand of the market is a faith-based belief, no less than the big bang. Most of the big questions remain unanswered regardless. Why there should be a strong and weak nuclear force, how all property isn't stolen when the first person to purchase land bought it from someone who killed to take it, what is consciousness etc.
This I must express my disagreement with. Science is not a religion as it generally fails to match religious criteria. There is a clear difference between science and religion, and you can mean a lot about science being good/bad/imperfect/unsatisfactory or whatever your fancy, but that it is a religion is not quite correct imo. I would like to share some of the reasons why I don't think it is justified to call science a religion.
First of all, a trivial observation; science and religion are generally very different when it comes to their goals as well as their methods to achieve them. Science seeks to explain the origin, nature and processes of the physically observable universe, whereas religion (or religions) seeks to explain the meaning of human existence, to define the nature of our soul, to justify the existence of deities and an afterlife whilst maintaining devotion to one or several deities, among other things. Just by this their goals are generally very different.
When it comes to the methods of achieving these respective goals, they differ pretty much too. Science uses physical evidence and careful objective observations with very harsh criteria for acceptance, it develops theories usually relying on mathematics, it predicts outcomes, it creates hypothesis to check them against reality through experiment and it constantly throws away bad hypothesis based on the available evidence and revises theories to make them better. Science is like an ever changing flux of ideas and opinion, constantly threatened by a new approach, by some new genious, by a better observation or set of observations, by reliable evidence and better hypothesis and theories. It is completely provisional, and what is generally accepted today need not be tomorrow, given that we get better observations and evidence etc.
Religion, on the other hand, commonly use divine inspiration, interpretation of ancient texts, personal insights such as spiritual and/or mystical experiences and the way I see it is not provisional in the same way science is. Sure, religions have changed along with the way society changes and demand it too, thank God, but many of the core tenets stays nevertheless the same.
Religion just assumes a lot more than what science does, because it assumes the existence of immaterial realms, has faith in these immaterial realms, it assumes entities residing in these realms, all about which science remains skeptical or silent. You may say that, well science assumes and has faith in an objective/material universe, and while this is certainly a core philosophy of many scientists for which there is ultimately no proof, in principle this doesn't concern their work. We could still have all of our science without even considering this question, because science can in principle be done without any of these assumptions or articles of faith, whereas religion - except for pure empirical mysticism with no metaphysical system, just methods, and thus not really religion in its common sense - can't be without fundamental assumptions and faith.
Furthermore, science is not really about faith (as in belief and/or acceptance without evidence). I don't have faith, in the strict sense of this word, that the theories I am working with every day is correct. I have evidence backing this up from countless of experiments I have done myself, that many have done before and that can be done by anyone to reach the same conclusions. I have modeled phenomena myself, deduced formulas through mathematical manipulation, created mathematical models based on concrete observations that agree with the textbooks and so on. In short, I don't consider this a faith-based belief, but intellectual honesty.
When there is DNA linking someone to a crime scene, for example semen in a raped girls vagina, belonging to a spesific person, you don't have a faith-based belief that this person actually was at the scene and that he raped this girl, but you have evidence good enough to claim with very great certainty that he did. The same goes for science, except for perhaps the utter extremes of theoretical physics such as string theory, that has solid evidence and good reasons to back it up.
Of course in principle there could always be an infinitesimal small chance that your pen suddenly flies up in the sky when you drop it, or that electrical currents don't induce magnetic fields and vice versa, in the strictest sense we can't deny this, but you don't have a faith-based belief that it will hit the floor once you drop it or that electrical currents induce magnetic fields and vice versa. If this is so, then you'll have to define everything as faith-based beliefs because ultimately in principle nothing is certain, and I'll agree. But then this is no argument at all to back up the assertion that science is a religion.
But uhm, perhaps this is very off-topic, and if you consider it to be just let me know, and perhaps we could have this exchange of opinion over PM or something. Remember HF, I have just stated my reasons for disagreement, and all of this is opinion and possibly also a question of semantics, so don't get me wrong on this one. Looking forward to see you what you think, buddy.
Peace.
