You hear it said often nowadays that science is a religion. It has its doctrines, fanatics, saints, heretics, rituals, and clergy. That belief in science is itself almost an oxymoron does not for a moment give them pause who shout down the nonbelievers.
Conflating science and religion in this way does a disservice to the truest, most perfect forms of both. If you will forgive the pedantry, we must first understand what each properly is.
Science is, essentially, the pursuit of truth through our observation of the world. We may talk about modern methods of forming hypotheses and testing and measurement, all of which are important tools to be sure, but at its core, if you are using observation and reason to understand true things about reality, you are doing science.
Fundamentally, the only tools we have for science are our senses — sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell — through which we can know the world directly, and our rational mind, which we can use to “make sense” of what we sense. Viewed this way, science is simultaneously humbling and incredibly proud. That we are restricted to such meager means as a few sense organs and the gray matter between our ears must necessarily limit what we can possibly know about something as immense and complex as everything. And yet, look at what we can know. A young child can grasp a phenomena and mysterious and complex as gravity. Not with any mathematical precision, but that he is not shocked to let go of something and watch it fall to the ground every time.
Notice though what science is not. It is not belief in what someone else, a “scientist” tells you. Such faith is just that, not knowledge, but a species of belief. As advanced as the discoveries of modern science have become and as distant from our own knowledge, we will often confuse the two. Many of us can repeat the words, or conjure an image someone with some technical proficiency gave us to explain how a computer or a radio or an engine work, but for all but the most proficient, these are just poetry and pretty pictures. We know we can hear a friend across the world when we call them on the phone, we know our car starts when we turn the key, and we believe what we have been told about how those things happen, but we really have nothing beyond that belief to base it on. It might as well be magic except smart people have told you not to believe in magic, so you don’t.
This is the first confusion. We know science must tell us something true about the world. Again, your cell phone works, so the people who made it must have gotten something right. We also know that we are part of a society where people understand such things. Somehow, this leads us to think that we individually understand such things. When all we really do, much more often than we even realize, is believe the word of some authority, and forget that it is something we believe.
As a quick example: everyone knows that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around like they believed back in the dark ages. But do you know that? How do you, personally, know that that is true. Without relying fundamentally on what someone else has told you, can you prove it to yourself? Do you even know how you would do this?
(Note: I certainly also think the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around. I also have a pretty good idea how I could prove this to myself with enough nights of stargazing. I haven’t done it though. So I, like most people, believe in heliocentrism. But I can’t say that I know it is true.)
And now we see the disservice we do to science, conflating it with religion. We have confused our naive, often unconscious, belief in the word of authorities with our own knowledge, and we call this unconscious belief “science”. Real science is the actual knowledge possessed by those who have observed and understood it, without any shadow of belief. This other, belief-based “science” is ultimately dogmatic. There are the things you have been told are true and the things you have been told are false, with no desire to try to test or validate these things, because it would never enter your mind to do so. Why should it? You think you know them. It is the unthinking religion of a cult.
As I mentioned at the top, we have also done a disservice to religion in this description, but I will save that discussion for another time.
Aristotelian AnCap Physicist Catholic? Do you happen to know the one who runs this YouTube channel?
https://www.youtube.com/user/canis760