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People may confuse believing in the scientific method for believing in the current scientific consensus, which as you point out is fluid. However, for the aver

People may confuse believing in the scientific method for believing in the current scientific consensus, which as you point out is fluid. However, for the average person, a dogmatic belief in the scientific method would be a huge step up over religion.

war1025 8y ago
That wouldn't be a step up over religion, that would just be religion.
- dymk 8y ago
  Religion and science derive understanding about the world in fundamentaly different and incompatible ways. To call it religion is just incorrect.
  - war1025 8y ago
    Science is just systematic problem solving. It is a very unremarkable thing. When people build it up to something more than that, then it takes on aspects of religion. A scientist doing science isn't religion. A non-scientist believing everything someone says "because science" is.
  - dnautics 8y ago
    As a scientist here's my take: 1) in the ultimate abstraction, science is a religion. It depends on the precept that the rules are more or less or measurably the same from today to yesterday to tomorrow. You can't bootstrap empiricism without begging the question, so, there is at least one item of faith at the core. 2) excepting this, science in the ideal is indeed a wholly different beast. So you could say it is this the weakest form of religion, or, at least, the religion with the fewest dependencies. 3) in practice, the edifice of science is quite full of people who are hypocritical and flagrantly breaking the rules which you expect would be necessary to maintain the high standard that marks the difference between religion and science. These violations are often swept under the rug quietly and even when they get really big the organization is incredibly good at closing its ranks. I'd say there are a lot of parallels between the science industrial complex and, highly organized religions (such as megachurches and hierarchical institutions like the Southern Baptist or Catholic Church) than most people who see science as a source of power ought to be comfortable with.
    - mfoy_ 8y ago
      Yup, academia is outrageously political.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
      > 1) in the ultimate abstraction, science is a religion. It depends on the precept that the rules are more or less or measurably the same from today to yesterday to tomorrow. You can't bootstrap empiricism without begging the question, so, there is at least one item of faith at the core. That's actually wrong, albeit widely believed. In a purely random world with no patterns that could possibly be discovered, empiricism still gives you the optimal result. The only difference between such a world and a world with patterns is that in a purely random world, any other method would also give you the optimal result, because no method has any predictive power. Empiricism gives you optimal results no matter whether the world has patterns or not, in contrast to all other methods, which only give you optimal results if the world has no patterns. So, if you want to have optimal results, empiricism is the way to go, there are no alternatives unless you already know that you are in an unpredictable world.
    - nf05papsjfVbc 8y ago
      While I detest the notion of science being religion, often I too have thought about your first point (thus I did make it a point to vote your comment up in the hope that more people will see it). Ultimately science does rely on one core aspect of things being taken on faith: that what we observe today will also be so tomorrow. It is in theory possible that everything is random and it's just a coincidence that all the laws of nature that man has come up with seem to hold up so far. At any moment, the universe could go haywire and perhaps we were wrong all this time and it's just random? This is possible of course but not a useful model for man in his attempt to understand the world.
  - phd514 8y ago
    Thomas Kuhn would disagree.
    - war1025 8y ago
      Really meaning to read "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" at some point. I had a philosophy professor in college who was all about that guy. Definitely shaped my worldview to some extent.
    - Symmetry 8y ago
      One thing I found very valuable in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a quick shortcut to telling if a field is doing "normal science" or not. If students are taught with textbooks distilling the field's important insights in a readable form then it probably is. The originator of an important idea is rarely the most skilled at expressing it to newcomers, but if your field can't tell if a rephrasing of an idea is still true or if it is more concerned with the prestige of the founders than the amassing of truth then it will tend to use original texts.
  - m_fayer 8y ago
    Fundamentally, I see religion as an enterprise that defines the structure of existence (metaphysics), explains how humans in their "base state" are deficient within that structure, to their detriment and that of others, and finally establishes elaborate practices for addressing the deficiency. Perhaps you can find something analogous to this structure in psychology, but I just don't see it in the rest of the scientific landscape.
    - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
      I could stretch it to say that climate science exactly 'defines the structure of existence (metaphysics), explains how humans in their "base state" are deficient within that structure, to their detriment and that of others, and finally establishes elaborate practices for addressing the deficiency' - except that the practices, so far, don't actually address the deficiency adequately. I will agree that I don't see this structure elsewhere in science...
    - ConceptJunkie 8y ago
      Perhaps not, but I definitely see a lot of things analogous that in politics.
  - diegoholiveira 8y ago
    > Religion and science derive understanding about the world in fundamentaly different and incompatible ways. They are not incompatible, as the pope John Paul II states: Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.
    - killaken2000 8y ago
      An alternative idea is that the pope is only saying that so the science-minded folks don't leave.
- sremani 8y ago
  There is a word for it, "Scientism"
- x220 8y ago
  You seem to think that "religion" means "blind adherence to something", which is really, really narrow. Is COBOL a religion?
  - war1025 8y ago
    "dogmatic belief in the scientific method" is as much a religion as anything else. Particularly when you are talking about it as a precept for the general public.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
      No, it's not a religion, it's simply a nonsense phrase. The scientific method at its core is the rejection of dogmatic belief, and thus you are talking about "dogmatic belief in the rejection of dogmatic belief", which is simply a sequence of words that doesn't have any meaning.
  - thedaemon 8y ago
    Then the translation of "religion" is "faith".
Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
A dogmatic belief in anything is detrimental. It takes wisdom to understand this. Many followers of science lack this. Scientific method is a great tool - for the type of questions that it is designed to deal with - and a disaster waiting to happen if used for other areas of inquiry.
- devoply 8y ago
  Except wisdom in large complex systems is impossible. Like for instance take any piece of technology you are going to introduce into the system. How can anyone be wise about how that technology will effect the system before hand? After the fact how can you get rid of the technology when millions or people depend on it for their existence? The same is true of pure knowledge. You introduce a new paradigm. You don't know how it will effect all the other knowledge that depends on it. Once it's adopted careers of many scientists depend on it... it's only after those scientists die and a new paradigm is found that the next generation can build its career on that old knowledge dies. None of this is due to wisdom. It's just the way the political economy works. Wisdom only applies to individual action about things that have a small enough scope to have some idea about their impact on decisions. For anything bigger than that, it's political... and I highly doubt the crowds have wisdom especially about untested things.
- stdbrouw 8y ago
  > Scientific method is a great tool - for the type of questions that it is designed to deal with - and a disaster waiting to happen if used for other areas of inquiry. What other areas of inquiry would that be?
  - featherrust 8y ago
    Interpersonal relationships?
    - igor47 8y ago
      I'm a fan of NVC(non-violent communication) and that framework could be summarized by the sentence, "when you do X,I feel Y". You basically become an instrument that reports on your internal state, plus you're also supposed to avoid assuming anything about the other person's internal state. This is a lot more like science then the usual default of blaming and assumptions and implicit expectations that most people conduct their relationships in.
madspindel 8y ago
"The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." Written by Albert Einstein
- vkazanov 8y ago
  Source, pls. Where and when did he say that?
  - madspindel 8y ago
    It's from the book Ideas And Opinions: https://www.amazon.com/Ideas-Opinions-Albert-Einstein-ebook/dp/B004G8P2SW/ https://www.amazon.com/Ideas-Opinions-Albert-Einstein-ebook/... Some other quotes: "The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition." "Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion." "His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages."
    - jhbadger 8y ago
      The problem is that Einstein didn't mean "religion" to mean a belief in either a God or an afterlife, as most people assume. He just had a sense of wonder in regard to the natural world. So what? So does Richard Dawkins. "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." -- Albert Einstein, 1954, letter to Joseph Dispentiere.
superqwert 8y ago
Which scientific method? Scientific methods differ a lot between the sciences - especially between the physical and special sciences, for example.
- callmekit 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
  - superqwert 8y ago
    Have you actually read the article? "Some philosophers and scientists have argued that there is no scientific method; they include physicist Lee Smolin and philosopher Paul Feyerabend (in his Against Method)" And even the previous paragraphs are not complete either. It says there: "Scientists then test hypotheses by conducting experiments or studies. A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable" Which is not necessarily true - for example, many arguments against the theory of evolution question whether it is a falsifiable theory (which is not saying that it is not true, but if there is no way to falsify it, how can it be said it is a scientific theory?). Many fields within Biology also have no predictive, but only descriptive power. Scientists who stick to a rigorous scientific method, such as seen in physics would have to reject most other branches of science. For a realist to accept scientific results in multiple fields, they have to use some philosophical reasons to accept the differing methods as valid ways of exploring reality.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > Which is not necessarily true - for example, many arguments against the theory of evolution question whether it is a falsifiable theory The “theory of evolution” is a large composite explanatory story wrapped around a large number of testable (mostly thoroughly tested) hypotheses. It's falsifiable by falsifying any of the components, though the replacement is liable to look remarkably similar but for who the falsified piece is addressed, and still likely to be called the “theory of evolution” even though the content is different.
tathougies 8y ago
> However, for the average person, a dogmatic belief in the scientific method would be a huge step up over religion. But the scientific method is based on the idea of an unchanging God / reality. Without that fundamental belief, theres no point in determining how physics behaves in an experiment, because if everything happens at the whims of anthropomorphic gods, then there is no reason to expect the same experiment will produce similar results. Thus, I don't really see the huge step up, especially given the inhumanity science has sometimes promulgated, and for which it frankly gets a free pass.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  The scientific method produces predictable, reproducible results, and other philosophies do not. Therefore, it's more useful.
- effie 8y ago
  Determinism is an idea of physics based on unchanging God/reality, but science is more general. Science can work without determinism, there are probabilistic / statistical methods, or hypotheses of effective physical laws changing in time. In quantum experiments, things happen at whims of nature and some such experiments do not produce similar results when repeated, but look random.
  - mensetmanusman 8y ago
    ‘Randomness’ with perfectly defined statistics and distributions is fascinating...
mymythisisthis 8y ago
That's how medieval scholasticsim was born. Originally logic, and the works of Greek philosophers were explored. Soon rules around logic became formalize, and a dogmatism set in. Afterwards students were discouraged from original thought around logic and just forced to learn the following mnemoic Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque prioris. Cesare, Camestres, Festino, Baroco secundae. Tertia Darapti, Disamis, Datisi, Felapton, Bocardo, Ferison habet. Quarta insuper addit Bramantip, Camenes, Dimaris, Fesapo, Fresison. Scholasticism then went onto have terrible connotations as a scholarly system.
- cameronh90 8y ago
  I think if you're studying science and logic, then you should definitely have a curiosity regarding the foundations of your field. But is that really something we can expect the general public to get involved in? It's a hugely mindbogglingly complex topic. For the average person to look at the scientific method, conclude it (at least mostly) works and believe in the fundamentals of the process, I think, is a good thing.
icelancer 8y ago
> a dogmatic belief in the scientific method This would be fine. But this is not what people mean when they say "science is real." They mean: "Believe what scientists say," and the definition of a scientist is... a person with a post-graduate degree that is popular on Facebook, probably, like Neil deGrasse Tyson.

war1025 8y ago

That wouldn't be a step up over religion, that would just be religion.

dymk 8y ago
Religion and science derive understanding about the world in fundamentaly different and incompatible ways. To call it religion is just incorrect.
- war1025 8y ago
  Science is just systematic problem solving. It is a very unremarkable thing. When people build it up to something more than that, then it takes on aspects of religion. A scientist doing science isn't religion. A non-scientist believing everything someone says "because science" is.
- dnautics 8y ago
  As a scientist here's my take: 1) in the ultimate abstraction, science is a religion. It depends on the precept that the rules are more or less or measurably the same from today to yesterday to tomorrow. You can't bootstrap empiricism without begging the question, so, there is at least one item of faith at the core. 2) excepting this, science in the ideal is indeed a wholly different beast. So you could say it is this the weakest form of religion, or, at least, the religion with the fewest dependencies. 3) in practice, the edifice of science is quite full of people who are hypocritical and flagrantly breaking the rules which you expect would be necessary to maintain the high standard that marks the difference between religion and science. These violations are often swept under the rug quietly and even when they get really big the organization is incredibly good at closing its ranks. I'd say there are a lot of parallels between the science industrial complex and, highly organized religions (such as megachurches and hierarchical institutions like the Southern Baptist or Catholic Church) than most people who see science as a source of power ought to be comfortable with.
  - mfoy_ 8y ago
    Yup, academia is outrageously political.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
    > 1) in the ultimate abstraction, science is a religion. It depends on the precept that the rules are more or less or measurably the same from today to yesterday to tomorrow. You can't bootstrap empiricism without begging the question, so, there is at least one item of faith at the core. That's actually wrong, albeit widely believed. In a purely random world with no patterns that could possibly be discovered, empiricism still gives you the optimal result. The only difference between such a world and a world with patterns is that in a purely random world, any other method would also give you the optimal result, because no method has any predictive power. Empiricism gives you optimal results no matter whether the world has patterns or not, in contrast to all other methods, which only give you optimal results if the world has no patterns. So, if you want to have optimal results, empiricism is the way to go, there are no alternatives unless you already know that you are in an unpredictable world.
  - nf05papsjfVbc 8y ago
    While I detest the notion of science being religion, often I too have thought about your first point (thus I did make it a point to vote your comment up in the hope that more people will see it). Ultimately science does rely on one core aspect of things being taken on faith: that what we observe today will also be so tomorrow. It is in theory possible that everything is random and it's just a coincidence that all the laws of nature that man has come up with seem to hold up so far. At any moment, the universe could go haywire and perhaps we were wrong all this time and it's just random? This is possible of course but not a useful model for man in his attempt to understand the world.
- phd514 8y ago
  Thomas Kuhn would disagree.
  - war1025 8y ago
    Really meaning to read "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" at some point. I had a philosophy professor in college who was all about that guy. Definitely shaped my worldview to some extent.
  - Symmetry 8y ago
    One thing I found very valuable in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a quick shortcut to telling if a field is doing "normal science" or not. If students are taught with textbooks distilling the field's important insights in a readable form then it probably is. The originator of an important idea is rarely the most skilled at expressing it to newcomers, but if your field can't tell if a rephrasing of an idea is still true or if it is more concerned with the prestige of the founders than the amassing of truth then it will tend to use original texts.
- m_fayer 8y ago
  Fundamentally, I see religion as an enterprise that defines the structure of existence (metaphysics), explains how humans in their "base state" are deficient within that structure, to their detriment and that of others, and finally establishes elaborate practices for addressing the deficiency. Perhaps you can find something analogous to this structure in psychology, but I just don't see it in the rest of the scientific landscape.
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    I could stretch it to say that climate science exactly 'defines the structure of existence (metaphysics), explains how humans in their "base state" are deficient within that structure, to their detriment and that of others, and finally establishes elaborate practices for addressing the deficiency' - except that the practices, so far, don't actually address the deficiency adequately. I will agree that I don't see this structure elsewhere in science...
  - ConceptJunkie 8y ago
    Perhaps not, but I definitely see a lot of things analogous that in politics.
- diegoholiveira 8y ago
  > Religion and science derive understanding about the world in fundamentaly different and incompatible ways. They are not incompatible, as the pope John Paul II states: Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.
  - killaken2000 8y ago
    An alternative idea is that the pope is only saying that so the science-minded folks don't leave.
sremani 8y ago
There is a word for it, "Scientism"
x220 8y ago
You seem to think that "religion" means "blind adherence to something", which is really, really narrow. Is COBOL a religion?
- war1025 8y ago
  "dogmatic belief in the scientific method" is as much a religion as anything else. Particularly when you are talking about it as a precept for the general public.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
    No, it's not a religion, it's simply a nonsense phrase. The scientific method at its core is the rejection of dogmatic belief, and thus you are talking about "dogmatic belief in the rejection of dogmatic belief", which is simply a sequence of words that doesn't have any meaning.
- thedaemon 8y ago
  Then the translation of "religion" is "faith".

Erlich_Bachman 8y ago

A dogmatic belief in anything is detrimental. It takes wisdom to understand this. Many followers of science lack this. Scientific method is a great tool - for the type of questions that it is designed to deal with - and a disaster waiting to happen if used for other areas of inquiry.

devoply 8y ago
Except wisdom in large complex systems is impossible. Like for instance take any piece of technology you are going to introduce into the system. How can anyone be wise about how that technology will effect the system before hand? After the fact how can you get rid of the technology when millions or people depend on it for their existence? The same is true of pure knowledge. You introduce a new paradigm. You don't know how it will effect all the other knowledge that depends on it. Once it's adopted careers of many scientists depend on it... it's only after those scientists die and a new paradigm is found that the next generation can build its career on that old knowledge dies. None of this is due to wisdom. It's just the way the political economy works. Wisdom only applies to individual action about things that have a small enough scope to have some idea about their impact on decisions. For anything bigger than that, it's political... and I highly doubt the crowds have wisdom especially about untested things.
stdbrouw 8y ago
> Scientific method is a great tool - for the type of questions that it is designed to deal with - and a disaster waiting to happen if used for other areas of inquiry. What other areas of inquiry would that be?
- featherrust 8y ago
  Interpersonal relationships?
  - igor47 8y ago
    I'm a fan of NVC(non-violent communication) and that framework could be summarized by the sentence, "when you do X,I feel Y". You basically become an instrument that reports on your internal state, plus you're also supposed to avoid assuming anything about the other person's internal state. This is a lot more like science then the usual default of blaming and assumptions and implicit expectations that most people conduct their relationships in.

madspindel 8y ago

"The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." Written by Albert Einstein

vkazanov 8y ago
Source, pls. Where and when did he say that?
- madspindel 8y ago
  It's from the book Ideas And Opinions: https://www.amazon.com/Ideas-Opinions-Albert-Einstein-ebook/dp/B004G8P2SW/ https://www.amazon.com/Ideas-Opinions-Albert-Einstein-ebook/... Some other quotes: "The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition." "Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion." "His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages."
  - jhbadger 8y ago
    The problem is that Einstein didn't mean "religion" to mean a belief in either a God or an afterlife, as most people assume. He just had a sense of wonder in regard to the natural world. So what? So does Richard Dawkins. "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." -- Albert Einstein, 1954, letter to Joseph Dispentiere.

superqwert 8y ago

Which scientific method? Scientific methods differ a lot between the sciences - especially between the physical and special sciences, for example.

callmekit 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
- superqwert 8y ago
  Have you actually read the article? "Some philosophers and scientists have argued that there is no scientific method; they include physicist Lee Smolin and philosopher Paul Feyerabend (in his Against Method)" And even the previous paragraphs are not complete either. It says there: "Scientists then test hypotheses by conducting experiments or studies. A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable" Which is not necessarily true - for example, many arguments against the theory of evolution question whether it is a falsifiable theory (which is not saying that it is not true, but if there is no way to falsify it, how can it be said it is a scientific theory?). Many fields within Biology also have no predictive, but only descriptive power. Scientists who stick to a rigorous scientific method, such as seen in physics would have to reject most other branches of science. For a realist to accept scientific results in multiple fields, they have to use some philosophical reasons to accept the differing methods as valid ways of exploring reality.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Which is not necessarily true - for example, many arguments against the theory of evolution question whether it is a falsifiable theory The “theory of evolution” is a large composite explanatory story wrapped around a large number of testable (mostly thoroughly tested) hypotheses. It's falsifiable by falsifying any of the components, though the replacement is liable to look remarkably similar but for who the falsified piece is addressed, and still likely to be called the “theory of evolution” even though the content is different.

tathougies 8y ago

> However, for the average person, a dogmatic belief in the scientific method would be a huge step up over religion. But the scientific method is based on the idea of an unchanging God / reality. Without that fundamental belief, theres no point in determining how physics behaves in an experiment, because if everything happens at the whims of anthropomorphic gods, then there is no reason to expect the same experiment will produce similar results. Thus, I don't really see the huge step up, especially given the inhumanity science has sometimes promulgated, and for which it frankly gets a free pass.

WalterBright 8y ago
The scientific method produces predictable, reproducible results, and other philosophies do not. Therefore, it's more useful.
effie 8y ago
Determinism is an idea of physics based on unchanging God/reality, but science is more general. Science can work without determinism, there are probabilistic / statistical methods, or hypotheses of effective physical laws changing in time. In quantum experiments, things happen at whims of nature and some such experiments do not produce similar results when repeated, but look random.
- mensetmanusman 8y ago
  ‘Randomness’ with perfectly defined statistics and distributions is fascinating...

mymythisisthis 8y ago

That's how medieval scholasticsim was born. Originally logic, and the works of Greek philosophers were explored. Soon rules around logic became formalize, and a dogmatism set in. Afterwards students were discouraged from original thought around logic and just forced to learn the following mnemoic Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque prioris. Cesare, Camestres, Festino, Baroco secundae. Tertia Darapti, Disamis, Datisi, Felapton, Bocardo, Ferison habet. Quarta insuper addit Bramantip, Camenes, Dimaris, Fesapo, Fresison. Scholasticism then went onto have terrible connotations as a scholarly system.

cameronh90 8y ago
I think if you're studying science and logic, then you should definitely have a curiosity regarding the foundations of your field. But is that really something we can expect the general public to get involved in? It's a hugely mindbogglingly complex topic. For the average person to look at the scientific method, conclude it (at least mostly) works and believe in the fundamentals of the process, I think, is a good thing.

icelancer 8y ago

> a dogmatic belief in the scientific method This would be fine. But this is not what people mean when they say "science is real." They mean: "Believe what scientists say," and the definition of a scientist is... a person with a post-graduate degree that is popular on Facebook, probably, like Neil deGrasse Tyson.