When someone say they believe in Science, it means they subscribe to fact and evidence based reasoning. And that if there are evidence or facts that overturns their current belief, they'll gladly accept it.
> And that if there are evidence or facts that overturns their current belief, they'll gladly accept it. There are no such equivalence in religion.
It is explicitly the role of a Prophet, Messiah, Bodhisattva, etc. to do such things — introduce new evidence that overturns or convolutes current beliefs
The day to day practice of all established religions involves reasoning through a historical lineage of commentaries on existing evidence and continually appending to it with new instances. Religion exists at the intersection of jurisprudence (what should be?) and the scientific method (what is true?). Both Law and Science are human philosophies that directly descended from religious primitives.
True in a very general sense, although you'd have to exclude religions where such things are allowed to say that accurately.
Agreed that this is the dominant narrative in global culture. However my point is that science appears to be fairly poor at building universal belief, which is something religion excelled at with scientific precision. There are advantages and disadvantages to both cultures. One disadvantage is organizing ourselves around something like global climate change where scientific consensus is near unanimous, but the culture at large is very slow to heed. Religion is very good at getting masses of people to do what they are told regardless of their best interest. Look at the American religious voter for example.
My point is that if science is more than a methodology, if it is a cultural spectacle, then it's probably wise for us all to admit that it is in fact very much like a religion. I am saying that science as a cultural reality can benefit from dropping the claim to be better than, or something other than a religion.
>However my point is that science appears to be fairly poor at building universal belief, which is something religion excelled at with scientific precision.
I don't think so. Science has far less variance between cultures than religion. Math, physics, chemistry, etc are largely the same across cultures. Meanwhile diversity and antagonism between religions is extremely high.
The biggest difference is that with science only experts get to truly participate in science. With religions every believer is participating either through prayers, religious gatherings, religious holidays, etc.
Agreed, science excels are building objective reality. However I'd propose that it does come at the expense of subjective reality. So most people believe in God while most reject climate change.
To your second point, it was similar when monks were the only ones who could read. But everyone can own a lighter or watch a tv - these are the artifacts and participatory culture of the scientific "religion". I'd argue that they are superior in some ways but inferior in others.
> science appears to be fairly poor at building universal belief, which is something religion excelled at with scientific precision
Can you elaborate on this? What, exactly, is this universal belief?
On your statement of scientific precision -what do you mean by "scientific" and "precise"?
I'm trying to follow what you're saying in this discussion, but it's difficult because we do not share the same definitions. EG, you seem to be using science in place where I would use "process for iterating to meet a goal". To me, science is trying to prove yourself wrong a million ways, so you can sort of accept that the null hypothesis is wrong.
Put another way - I would be ecstatic to see undeniable objective proof of a deity. Religious believers would not be similarly happy to have one of their core beliefs destroyed. The difference is religious beliefs are fragile to disorder; scientific beliefs are anti-fragile.
Here: the scientufic world view is pretty clear on the abortion issue, yet whole voting blocks reject right to choose and often scientific discourse altogether simply on this issue. And we know it as fact: people don't vote based on scientific evidence.
So why not?
My argument is simple. Modern science does not concern itself with telling people what they want to hear to maintain authoritative reality. Religion was a science of telling people what they wanted to hear to maintain authoritative reality. Same methodology, different paradigm. Different objective.
My point is that either way, you area generating reality. So we say, yes but science is more accurate as true, so we have washers and dryers and cars and medicine. But we also have atom bombs and given extinction event and multiple potential ways to wipe ourselves out. We are also more ideologically divided than in any period in history, I'd argue, and precisely when it is most necessary that we be informed and unified.
So science is a more powerful paradigm for building certain technocultural realities at the expense of others. I would say it fails in ways that the older science of cultural uniformity and authority succeeded.
While you say that science creates reality, I say it reflects reality. Ironically, you are constructing your own reality based on the stories you're telling yourself - the things you say below are vague, unsupported, and generally orthogonal to the points that you seem to be most interested in. Science cannot solve the problems that ethics focuses on.
> the scientufic world view is pretty clear on the abortion issue, yet whole voting blocks reject right to choose
What is the scientific consensus about abortion? Do you mean the question of consciousness? That's an important component, but it's not an answer to a challenging ethics question. 55-60% of voters are pro-choice in the US[0], btw.
I don't think voters vote based on the science. This is unfortunate in areas like climate change, but not all that relevant in morality-driven context, like for abortion.
> But we also have atom bombs and given extinction event and multiple potential ways to wipe ourselves out. We are also more ideologically divided than in any period in history.
Is your point here that we have applied science to develop things that are used for good as well as bad? That's uncontroversial, but I'm not sure how that supports your point that modern science tells people what they want to hear to maintain authoritative reality (what the heck is authoritative reality, anyhow?)
> We are also more ideologically divided than in any period in history, I'd argue, and precisely when it is most necessary that we be informed and unified
It might feel this way - it does to me! - but, frankly, I don't think you can accurately measure modern, much less historical, things like "dividedness" or "[it is now] most necessary to be informed and unified".
I'm not going to argue that there aren't big, important, hard problems to solve. But I also think this type of handwringing tone is unsupported by objective evidence.
> So science is a more powerful paradigm for building certain technocultural realities at the expense of others.
Do you mean expense of other realities, like religion? That makes sense -- when one paradigm proves superior to another in describing reality, it is natural that it will replace the less-useful model.
What we currently are focused on is a very small slice of reality. I don't see much reason to think these are new problems, or that they're unique.
> I would say it fails in ways that the older science of cultural uniformity and authority succeeded.
We do know what a lot of the costs for uniformity and authority are. Especially when carried out by imperfect humans - that's what leads to the Inquisition, or racism, or any of the other base instincts we seek to reduce.
I think you should look into the differences between "science", and "scientism".
The latter is what happens when scientifically illiterate people are spreading scientific news. Scientism is treating science as religion, as infallible, as the bringer of truth, while forgetting what science really is; the doubts, the uncertainties, the falsifiability, the hypotheses, the process.
I understand this full well. I'm speaking in the context of that you'd are calling scientism because I think it's the dominant religion of our times. An example is this slogan: "I believe in science". We might say well, this person is saying they have faith that the scientific method produces ... But I would argue that this person (in aggregate in modern society) is actually much more like a religious believer. They believe without any real idea of what science is.
I don't dispute the difference between the scientific method and the mythological one. All I'm saying is that religion had at it's heart a hard science and mythology was it's product. I am sorry saying that modern science produces mostly mythodology as well. I don't claim that everyone has to agree, but this is how it looks to me.
So I see a world around me made of scientism. Yet you never hear the word, and certainly it's not a legitimate sounding word. So I go a step further and say, our modern religion is science which produces the mythodology which we consume. I think it's a valid position. But of course no dominant paradigm likes to consider it's falacies.
When someone say they believe in Science, it means they subscribe to fact and evidence based reasoning. And that if there are evidence or facts that overturns their current belief, they'll gladly accept it.
There are no such equivalence in religion.