I think you might be a little overly harsh. While I obviously agree with you I think the larger point he was making is an interesting one. It’s also been a major subject of the philosophy of science for decades.
If we are going to have an interesting discussion here let’s all remember this is not a black white discussion but a continuum one.
I don’t think you should see these two statements as contradictory. They’re both true. But I think the point bobman is making is underappreciated, particularly among a certain subset of atheists. Note that I am an atheist so I’m not trying to shoehorn in an argument for religious faith here. It’s also just, I think, illustrative of a general underappreciation for the role of sociological explanations.
Also I highly recommend this classic text on the sociology of knowledge
I take it the point is not that science is like religion, it’s that people’s acceptance of science is like people’s acceptance of religion.
That should seem somewhat likely, imo. It’s certainly the case that the rise of science meant a loss of religion, that has to suggest that they’re doing something pretty similar for a lot of people. Answering questions about the world and saying what kinds of things we should do to get the sorts of outcomes we want.
That leads to something I think bobman’s posts should have as well, which is that those experiences of us wanting something and using ‘science’ or ‘religion’ to get it play a role in what we accept, not just appeals to authority. The two are interlinked, e.g. we might use authority to tell us what relevant features of an experience was, but there’s also plenty of examples of experiences of success or failure leading people to lose faith or believe something different, and judging authority based on what ‘feels right’ in the light of those experiences.
People seem to be conflating “knowing science facts” with “the scientific method.”
It’s not hard to just casually look at the history of science and see a bunch of people making and discarding ideas in good-faith. Gravity is a great example, actually. People at the time understood there were aspects to it that didn’t make sense! Newton wasn’t afraid to admit as much about his own theories. It’s a defining part of science and there’s almost nothing like that
Maybe there’s a point if what is meant is that most people don’t really believe in religion very strongly and are just shrugging and going “whatever” most of the time.
This is also true. There’s research on secularization that shows that most of the increase in those who identify as non-affiliated in surveys comes from people who were previously only weakly religious, or whose parents were only weakly religious. You see this reflected (for example) in the fact that more liberal mainline protestant denominations of Christianity are losing adherents in the US more quickly than evangelicals. One of the more interesting articles I’ve read on secularization refers to “fuzzy fidelity”:
Many people are neither regular churchgoers nor self-consciously non-religious. The term ‘fuzzy fidelity’ describes this casual loyalty to tradition. Religion usually plays only a minor role in the lives of such people. Religious change in European countries follows a common trajectory whereby fuzzy fidelity rises and then falls over a very extended period.
Voas later extended this research to the US and found similar trends (Voas 2016).
Maybe your familiarity with Christianity is very different from mine, but while I certainly grant that religion and science have fundamental differences, being open about what is not understood or what doesn’t make sense isn’t one of them. “The mystery of faith” is a core part of the Roman Catholic mass (and one that is preserved by ~all protestant denominations that adopted that structure for their services), and it is professed week in and week out. Granted, many recite it without thinking about how it doesn’t make sense, but likewise with gravity. You might try to argue that unlike science, religion isn’t trying to come up with an explanation for that mystery, but I can assure you there are libraries full of theology on the subject.
Again, I don’t doubt their differences (I am quite steeped in each), but I think this isn’t a good one to use.
You can find the same thing in the history of religion as well (the early church councils, the scholastic movement, the rabbinical tradition in Judaism). People who take their governing world-view seriously tinker with it, try to improve it, argue about it. If the world-view is religion, sometimes they end up getting burned at the stake for their troubles, but successful religions are pretty good at integrating these challenges.
Also, the quote about science advancing one funeral at a time suggests that good faith among scientists is not really the key to why it works–successful scientific ideas can propagate among the most bull-headed group as long as the better ones are better at recruiting new adherents.
Sir, this is a low-content thread.
I also wholeheartedly agree that scientific fields are not nearly as good at adopting new paradigms in the face of new evidence as they would have you believe. I saw this posted as a Facebook meme a little while back:
And I went down a little wikipedia rabbit hole reading up on some of the backstories of these guys whose theories I knew but whose lives I didn’t. Like, these guys were still having to fight for the idea that atoms were a thing in the 20th century!
indeed
Some interesting takes. You might find this useful if you aren’t familiar with it.
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This probably isn’t the best example. The early philosophers and scientists largely had their ideas rejected (and were indeed persecuted) because of religion. Furthermore, science being wrong a lot is a sign that science is working - it has to be wrong and it must be wrong sometimes for science to even happen. That is how scientific progress works. The difference between science and religion is, when science is wrong, it accepts the new evidence.
I don’t think belief in science and the scientific method are being conflated in the way you think. They are not very separable though, one cannot exist without the other. My point is that with religion, you are supposed to take most (if not all) things on faith - truth originates from God. So it is therefore unknowable outside of God, which we all (or most of us) know either doesn’t exist or isn’t super easy to talk to, at the very least. By definition, believing anything science teaches isn’t taking it “on faith” or by those with the proper authority. You don’t have to physically perform experiments to know that there’s a high likelihood something is not total BS. If you doubt anything science teaches you can go look at the evidence yourself and accept or reject it. That is the key difference and what bobman is ignoring in his main post, IMO.
If you take his argument to the extreme, then nothing at all is really “knowable” which is patently ridiculous to me. And no I am not misinterpreting his post, it’s an argument that pops up all the time in atheist circles and one that really, really rankles me.
My experience is largely with a non-denominational (but basically protestant) church, which I have written about before. From age of 0 to about 18 I was heavily indoctrinated, and my church was my school. It is a lot different than catholic churches. Breaking out of that mind prison required a lot of questioning of the evidence presented to me by religion, and by science, and weighing the two. Science won. So telling me that believing scientific facts is the same mechanism as believing in religion because I haven’t personally done the research or seen the studies and am simply taking it on authority in the same manner as religion is extremely upsetting to me.
So I am mostly speaking from this perspective and this type of religion, which is very prominent in evangelical circles in this nation. I’m not specifically talking to religion where people go to church once a week and otherwise don’t think about it, but that probably still falls under what I am saying.
“pretty good” seems like a huge stretch to me. Religion changes at a glacial pace, and it’s often hard to see whether it’s “improving” in any real way. People are still citing chapter and verse from texts that are thousands of years old! You really have to put on your contrarian glasses and squint if you want to see the equivalence.
That old chestnut has always been a wild exaggeration of how science actually works. The reality is that every day scientists change their minds and realize they were dead wrong about this or that.
And you’re sweeping a lot under the rug with “Oh, these guys are just better at recruiting new adherents.” The whole process of “recruiting” is people looking at the evidence in good faith and thinking about it critically.
This is a really good post.
I’ve gone through a couple of really rough periods where I essentially lost everything that I thought gave my life value and meaning. Sometimes I rebuilt what I had, others it was no use and I reinvented myself and discovered the parts that are true and good and constant, the parts that give my life value and meaning even if I lose everything else all over again.
Are you reading anything lately that speaks to what you think about this these days?
What kind of experiences do you have after this change of perception?
Bob, is that what you’re saying? I am only now catching up, but I understood you to be saying that for many people, the experience (not the mechanism) of science and religion is the same. I don’t see that as very controversial. To say that for many people, particularly scientists, the experiences are not at all similar does nothing to disprove that for many people, they are similar enough to be indistinguishable.
I think that’s true for epistemology in general. I personally think divine command theory and holy spirit epistemology aren’t at all persuasive, but I also think I sometimes experience scientific claims in a similar way.
Obviously if pressed, few would end up saying these are actually the same, but functionally? As in the vague concepts and categories that guide our decisions? Well, yeah, we all have a category of “things I accept from this source because I trust it and am not in a position to question it anyway”
