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It's not faith, it's trust, the difference being that trust can be broken and must be earned, faith relies on absolute adherence. You require zero faith to tru

It's not faith, it's trust, the difference being that trust can be broken and must be earned, faith relies on absolute adherence. You require zero faith to trust in the scientific community, because you can "spot check" what you learn at any point, if you decide you want to. It takes a lot less effort than you may initially think, to independently verify certain aspects of even complex scientific advancement. Consider even something as simple as ibuprofen; you're "spot checking" modern medicine when you take it and verify it reduces your fever or lowers your pain. Or when you make a phone call with your cell phone. You're "spot checking" a whole host of physics just be reliably receiving and sending signals from your cell phone; if any of the theory were wrong, your phone would not work. That's not faith, that's trust, because you have direct evidence of accuracy in what you've been told. It's probably not even worth getting into how much you're "spot checking" science by simply opening up Google Maps and seeing how accurately it determines where you are! I must repeat; zero percent of western understanding of hard or soft sciences require faith of any kind to be useful.

tonymet 5y ago
Naturally we're overindexing on telecom, given the HN audience – where we have practical applications of advanced physics. But it's less concrete with other "sciences" like evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics. Even cosmology & theoretical physics is taken more on faith than trust. What observations of the multiverse or string theory can we build our trust on? And medicine , molecular biology have also had mixed results, to the point that many beliefs were taken on faith (e.g. dietary vs blood cholesterol) My point is don't lump all the "sciences" together in one lot of "the science"– there's a spectrum of observability and corroboration depending on the field.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  No beliefs in science must be taken on faith. Some people do out of convenience perhaps, but they don't need to do, and if they decide not to, the path to corroboration is open to them.

tonymet 5y ago

Naturally we're overindexing on telecom, given the HN audience – where we have practical applications of advanced physics. But it's less concrete with other "sciences" like evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics. Even cosmology & theoretical physics is taken more on faith than trust. What observations of the multiverse or string theory can we build our trust on? And medicine , molecular biology have also had mixed results, to the point that many beliefs were taken on faith (e.g. dietary vs blood cholesterol) My point is don't lump all the "sciences" together in one lot of "the science"– there's a spectrum of observability and corroboration depending on the field.

TameAntelope 5y ago
No beliefs in science must be taken on faith. Some people do out of convenience perhaps, but they don't need to do, and if they decide not to, the path to corroboration is open to them.