Totally agree. Science is about knowledge of experimentally verifiable, repeatable and objective facts. Beliefs are neither objective nor verifiable.
I never went to India. I never went into Space. I never saw a human or a blood cell in a microscope. Still I know India exists, that Earth is not flat and that vaccines work. This is because I've been taught so many different facts and theories that all fit nicely together in a way I understand and that I can verify myself, and that are continuously and regularly confirmed by all the echoes I received from reality.
As for scientific mistakes, this is very well incorporated in the scientific process, new theories and facts replacing previous ones. However, as science progresses in a domain, new theories and facts are usually less and less groundbreaking than the previous ones. If you think Earth is a sphere, you're wrong, but much more right if you'd think it's flat.
I think you two are collectively very close to describing “science”. It’s good to acknowledge what we don’t definitively know, but generating testable hypothesis or theories based on experiences and known phenomena is an important step.
There are topics we don’t know the truth on, so we have to theorize. For instance, dark matter, or origins of Covid, or evolution, even. We could throw our hands in the air and say “we don’t know anything”, but part of coming into knowledge is taking an educated guess on the answer, testing it, and being right or wrong. From there, we recalibrate.
The problem comes when people dogmatically defend their old, disproven hypotheses in the face of insurmountable evidence. Not situations where people have valid critiques or are skeptical, but situations which are pretty open-and-shut. For instance, flat earth has always seemed to me to be a very obviously wrong theory.
Science is not an absolute knowledge. It has many unproved theories and makes mistakes on a regular basis.
(Please note that my world view is purely scientific but I'm using buddhist ideas for looking into my consciousness because science doesn't say much about it.)
The mistake is believing. What is believed is irrelevant. Science should not be taken at face value any more than religion should. If you accept science just because you are told to believe in it, then it's not science.
I think you're really just saying "your belief system is totally wrong and mine is the right one." If you're Hindu (if I understood the parent), it was known as much before as it was later known by Einstein.
This is something that always intrigues me. People that believe in science (me included) don't see how much faith they too have in what they are taught. And that over time and with more understanding, what they were taught also ends up being false. For example, I was taught the ultimate truth by scientists that electrons orbited an atomic nucleus. I had blind faith. Turns out we were all wrong.
Knowledge and understanding of the world is constantly growing. There are endless examples of how scientists and other intellectuals have a current paradigm of how something must work, only to be disproven in the future (usually by someone who gets castigated until held up years later). So to say 'believe in science' is actually dogma. It makes me cringe when I see it as a political banner, or along side signs like 'in this house we believe in....' It would be more accurate to say 'the scientific method works', but it really only works in the long run. At any point in time our understanding is incomplete and erroneous.
The facts are out there, whether you believe it or not, and eventually the scientific method will catch up.
Of course if you're not a trained scientist, then it's hard to appreciate how the scientific method works, and that even when we're very sure of something, true scientists will always hedge their statements. This will be misinterpreted by those who are outside this world as there being more gray than actually exists, and those with an agenda will drive a truck right through it.
This being said science has not researched every single phenomenon either. There would be no Science if all we had was disbelief in every extraordinary claim in the first place. At one point pretending that the Earth rotated around the sun was crazy for most people.
Science is a means of approaching beliefs. Science is not the philosophical position that we should be agnostic about the existence of gravity or magnitude of gravitational forces. Unlike other means of reaching beliefs, science supposes there is little reason to hold a belief that cannot be supported by induction from experimental data, and that a correctly set up experiment can falsify previously held beliefs and require the theory to be updated. A corollary of this is that stuff generally isn't to be believed simply because a very old book and much revered book says so (which is bad news for Aristotle's speculation as well as monotheism, but somewhat better news for Newton's laws because there are practical working applications of them). But when it comes to anthropogenic climate change or vaccine efficacy the evidence very much is there - people can either believe it is probably true or demonstrate their superior understanding of why evidence actually doesn't support the hypothesis (ideally by counter example, but pointing out confounding factors that have been missed is a start). Either approach is consistent with science, though only the latter will further scientific knowledge. An approach to formulating beliefs which isn't consistent with science is the prior that if scientists virtually all agree on the evidence base for something, the contrarian theory is probably right.
The problem is that nobody can verify the truth of every statement for themselves. Reality is too complex and no individual person has the time or the resources. For the vast majority of our beliefs, we have to rely on the consensus of experts, and that actually works really well. That doesn't mean science is perfect. But look at the theories that allow us to build a CPU with 50 billion transistors or a rocket that can go to the moon and tell me there isn't objective truth there.
I’m a believer in science - was a physics major in college. However, I find the hubris in science distasteful. Theories are treated like facts. Also, words like “we know” are used, and then a decade later that knowledge turns out to be wrong. Science changes, but at a point in time it often acts like it has reached the ultimate truth. A simple example: I remember in Jr High being taught that red shift and slowing of the expansion of the universe proved beyond doubt the Big Bang happened. Except, oops, turns out the universe is expanding after all. But you would be ridiculed if you didn’t believe
Right. And the point of science is the exploration of demonstrable facts. Belief and knowledge are two separate domains, and never the twain shall meet.
> Those two hold for, say roughly, 90% of what most people believe, secular or not
See my response to tonymet upthread.
> Even most scientific theories people believe, they haven't examined and are incapable of following their theories and experiements personally - they were just being told they are truth and they trust it to be so.
For some theories that are called "scientific", yes, this is true--but that's because the scientists themselves don't have a track record of correct experimental predictions to begin with. (String theory, for example.)
But for theories like, say, General Relativity, there is a huge track record of correct experimental predictions, and those predictions include things in our everyday experience now, like GPS. It's true that most people cannot verify for themselves the entire chain of reasoning that leads from the Einstein Field Equation to how their GPS device works, but they know that GPS works from their personal experience, so they know that whatever theory scientists are using to make GPS work, works. They don't have to take that on trust.
In other words, for scientific theories that actually have practical impacts, you don't have to just accept what scientists say on trust; you can look at their track record of correct predictions.
Science itself is a belief (or religion, depending on your epistemology), that the scientific method and associated tools, like the gold-standard double-blind study*, is the most effective way to form a model for reality.
On top of that, experimental results can only inform a subjective model for each individual. For example, children are informed about our solar system in a simple 2d plane, because that's useful enough. We can prove that the solar system has planetary deviation from the generally flat plane (up to 7 degrees) but that more advanced model is something that is generally learned later, out of pragmatism. You can spend a lifetime learning details and data, but you'll still die ignorant because gathering all of human knowledge is impractical at this point.
Therefore, relying on science alone, is not enough to inform your personal ideas about reality, even if you believe that it's the most reliable way to do so.
I never went to India. I never went into Space. I never saw a human or a blood cell in a microscope. Still I know India exists, that Earth is not flat and that vaccines work. This is because I've been taught so many different facts and theories that all fit nicely together in a way I understand and that I can verify myself, and that are continuously and regularly confirmed by all the echoes I received from reality.
As for scientific mistakes, this is very well incorporated in the scientific process, new theories and facts replacing previous ones. However, as science progresses in a domain, new theories and facts are usually less and less groundbreaking than the previous ones. If you think Earth is a sphere, you're wrong, but much more right if you'd think it's flat.
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