First, so I’m not misunderstood: Science does of course exist and it is not religion. But:

  • Not all published science is, in fact, science. The Replication Crisis is a real problem, meaning that a significant portion of published science is actually incorrect.
  • Only a very tiny portion of the population reads scientific papers and has the ability to understand them. That includes scientists and other well-educated people who don’t have any expertise on the specific field. Being a renown physicist doesn’t mean you know anything about psychology.
  • Scientific papers are filtered through science journalists who might or might not have any expertise in the field and might or might not understand the papers they write about. They then publish what they understood in a more accessible format (e.g. popular science magazines).
  • This is then read by minimum wage journalists with no understanding of any of the science, and they publish their misunderstandings in newspapers and other non-scientific publications.
  • This is then read by the general public who usually lack the skills and/or the resources to fact-check anything at all.
  • These members of the general public then take what they understood as fact and base their world view on it. At this point it hardly matters whether their source of incorrect information is the stack of Chinese whispers I wrote about above, or if it’s just straight-up made up by some religious leader.

There’s thousands of little (or big) misunderstandings in non-science that people believe and have faith in, that forms people’s world views and even their political views. And people often defend their misconceptions, like they would defend some religious views.

(Again, just to make sure I’m not misunderstood: I am no exception to this either. I got my field where I have a lot of knowledge, but for most fields I blindly trust some experts, because I have no way to verify stuff. I, too, for example, put my faith in doctors to heal my illnesses, even though I have no way to verify whether anything they say is true or not.)

  • zz31da@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    16 hours ago

    So then does trust == faith?

    Of course it’s not possible to understand absolutely everything, even as a well-informed scientist or academic. You say ‘blindly trusting’, but may be that’s quite the right way to put it, since, presumably, you have determined that those experts know better than you do, i.e. it’s not ‘blind’ in some sense. Whereas a religious person may blindly have faith that there is a God and a higher purpose (or whatever).

    That said, to counter my own point, I’m sure there are plenty of religious people who determine that their religious leaders or experts are worthy of trusting because of a perceived higher spiritual connection, social status, or similar.

    I think it all comes back to being able to think critically. In my mind at least, the word ‘trust’ implies some sort of rational thought process, whereas ‘faith’ has a bit more of an emotional connotation. But in reality it’s probably more of a heavily-overlapping Venn diagram (assuming there’s a distinction at all).