Science as a system of producing knowledge (and rules for what to do and how to live) differs from religion in key ways: 1. It places empirical observation as

Science as a system of producing knowledge (and rules for what to do and how to live) differs from religion in key ways: 1. It places empirical observation as the ultimate form of evidence, as opposed to scripture/existing knowledge. If you observe something that contradicts existing theories and other people can make that observation then existing theories are disproven, the end. This still takes time to propagate, but really only for highly complicated abstract theories(of which climate change might be one!) 2. Science has a built in competitive market type process for selecting 'scripture' and an incentive to constantly be updating it. Religions have more bureaucratic/despotic approaches to updating knowledge(college of cardinals/pope, influential preachers etc). 3. The core questions science tackles are physical and amenable to observation and maths. The core questions religion tackles are metaphysical, or to put them in evo-psych terms to do with selecting and reproducing rules of behavior that produce good societies in which to live over tens/hundreds of generations. In as much as science tries to enter into that hyper-long term planning game it should be treated with extreme suspicion, it's a different statistical environment to that of physics and the existing statistical tools of science are probably not up to the task. It's the land of Taleb's fat tails and iterated games and exponential chaos, not statistically modelable quantum experiments(top pick a complicated but tractable problem). Shitty metaphor: Hard sciences are about solving P problems, or at worst approximating NP or worse, but still computable, problems. Religion and social science are about providing heuristics to uncomputable problems(if you have a C program and all it does is return then it definitely halts etc). In as much as people take the NP approximations as seriously as the P solutions, they're in for some rude awakenings. In as much as a lot of our society does then we're in for a bumpy ride.