MattMaroon.com

In a couple conversations lately about science (one about global warming here, one about evolution elsewhere) and many in the past I’ve seen people who believe in the scientific perspective compared to religious people. The logic was that unless you’ve confirmed the data yourself (i.e. measured polar ice caps or studied finch bones on Galapagos) you’re just taking the word of someone else, so what’s the difference?

The difference, in actuality, is enormous. It’s based on the relative methods of the scientific and religious communities, the two of which are worlds apart. Putting your faith in one is not the same as putting faith in another.

The method of the religious “thinkers” is to say something is true because it is in a 2,000 year old book of 4,000 year old mistranslated Jewish folk stories. There’s no experimentation. There’s no logic. There are no revisions as new facts come to light. The Bible still claims that the Earth is square and rests on pillars, even though that was disproven millennia ago (in fact Eratosthenes estimated its circumference a couple hundred years before the Bible was even written). If you have enough money, you can pay Russians to blast you into space where you can see for yourself that that is not true. Most religious people of course aren’t stupid and don’t need to take a ride on a Soyuz to believe that, but they still subscribe to the overall epistemology and believe many things just because they were told them through a chain of sources that leads back to mistranslated folk stories, despite having no data available.

Science couldn’t be more unlike that. A good description I just found on Wikipedia is “Using controlled methods, scientists collect data in the form of observations, records of observable physical evidence of natural phenomena, and analyze this information to construct theoretical explanations of how things work.”

Just the fact that scientists run and publish experiments and collect data (which anyone can therefore check up on and attempt to replicate) and incorporates a process of revision as new theories and data are formed makes it the exact opposite of religion. Even if you never verify a single experiment, just knowing that you could and that others do makes it the exact opposite of religion.

There is, of course, a certain amount of faith involved for civilians when it comes to science, since one cannot verify for themselves even a tiny percentage of the knowledge they come across in their lifetimes. To expect people to do so, or compare those who trust in peer-reviewed data and experimentation to those who trust in folk stories, is absurd. We have a very limited amount of time on this planet, and too much we need to accomplish just to survive. But relying on something that is published, cited, cross-checked and open to public debate has no similarity to religion whatsoever.

Most people don’t believe in evolution because it’s fashionable. They believe in it because a large body of scientific evidence points toward it. And they’re trusting that a large group of scientists have reviewed that evidence, so there’s still some faith involved because that’s how we as humans manage to make any progress at all despite only having 40 or so useful years of life, but to compare it to trusting in mistranslated folk stories is just plain silly.

This entry was posted on December 5, 2008 at 3:02 am and is filed under Are Religious People Stupid? . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.