Ah, yes, I laughed pretty hard after reading this. As a scientist, I cannot have blind faith in science and still do my job. To fail to question science would be to stop working. Your claim that I have "blind faith" in science, therefore, is absolutely ludicrous.
But what's more, science is in no way, shape, or form a religion. It's nothing more and nothing less than the best method humans have yet found to discover the truth about reality.
Theres a difference between actual experience and how we describe experience. To describe experience, we create models or representations which are linguistic on the most base level. I see science as a descriptive model of reality, rather than as reality itself. As a descriptive model or story-system, science is fundamentally no different from religion. Both act as representations which allow us to share meaning culturally. But they are both maps rather than the territory, which means they are both subject to the
inaccuracies and distortions of representation.
The reason science has so much sway is that its a very useful model for manifesting thought into reality, and in observing and predicting actual experience. Some would claim its more useful than religious models, and thus is more accurate or closer to the
true nature of reality. I guess one of my questions is: what is it more useful for?
The biggest difference between science and other formal religions is that science operates around the myth of progress. At its core, it says that one idea or model is better than another, and that the better one will win out eventually in the marketplace of ideas. Evolution. The survival of the fittest - that which
fits actual experience the best.
But does it fit everyday experience the best? Do black holes or quantum particles have any relation to my every day life? Does knowing how to make a bigger building or a smarter bomb or prolong my life artificially really benefit me? We take it as an article of faith that it does. Progress = better + happier + more productive. But is that always the case - does that always fit the available data? It certainly does not. Heres a simple real-life example: do you have a favorite computer program that when the next version of it was released, they got rid of some of your favorite features? That happens all the time.
The thing I do like about science though is exactly this openness to change. Most religions are closed systems which only grudgingly admit doctrinal changes over generations of time. Oh whoops! That describes science too, doesnt it? My bad! But in all seriousness though, this ability to revise itself (at least on an idealistic level) is the best thing about the scientific religion. It recognizes that times change and people change (though they dont necessarily get better), and that the ideas that we live according to must change accordingly.
I know some of you are probably sitting there still after reading all this and screaming:
but science just IS true! You cant argue it! Why not? Because youre emotionally invested in it? Science is just a collection of ideas about reality, not reality itself. That said though, I think we have a pretty distorted view of how other cultures and time periods viewed their religion. For us, religious faith is generally a private matter - by that, I mean its something we
believe in no matter what. Our belief goes out first as a pathfinder for our experience, helping us to sort and categorize. But belief for us is in a lot of ways a consumerist pursuit. We get to dine at the buffet of ideas and choose which most closely match our own inner sense of spirituality. People in other times didnt run around picking and choosing though. For them, the way they interacted with religion was how we interact with science. It just
was. There wasnt any arguing except over minor theological differences (PS. theology used to be considered the queen of the sciences), and it didnt make any sense to question it, because doing so would take you outside the conceptual orbit of the society into a slippery world of heresy and persecution. People often laugh about how anyone could have been stupid enough to believe that the Sun orbited the Earth or that the Earth was flat. Its easy. Just look at the things that you believe about science. These erroneous assumptions are as invisible to you as those things were to people then.
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