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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".

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".