Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri...
by nf05papsjfVbc on Tuesday March 19, 2019 @08:50AM
(#19430237)
While I detest the notion of science being religion, often I too have thought about your first point (thus I did make it a point to vote your comment up in the hope that more people will see it). Ultimately science does rely on one core aspect of things being taken on faith: that what we observe today will also be so tomorrow. It is in theory possible that everything is random and it's just a coincidence that all the laws of nature that man has come up with seem to hold up so far. At any moment, the universe could go haywire and perhaps we were wrong all this time and it's just random? This is possible of course but not a useful model for man in his attempt to understand the world.
Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri...
by mfoy_ on Monday March 18, 2019 @12:56PM
(#19422791)
Yup, academia is outrageously political.
Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri...
by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC on Tuesday March 19, 2019 @03:27AM
(#19428784)
> 1) in the ultimate abstraction, science is a religion. It depends on the precept that the rules are more or less or measurably the same from today to yesterday to tomorrow. You can't bootstrap empiricism without begging the question, so, there is at least one item of faith at the core.
That's actually wrong, albeit widely believed. In a purely random world with no patterns that could possibly be discovered, empiricism still gives you the optimal result. The only difference between such a world and a world with patterns is that in a purely random world, any other method would also give you the optimal result, because no method has any predictive power. Empiricism gives you optimal results no matter whether the world has patterns or not, in contrast to all other methods, which only give you optimal results if the world has no patterns. So, if you want to have optimal results, empiricism is the way to go, there are no alternatives unless you already know that you are in an unpredictable world.
2) excepting this, science in the ideal is indeed a wholly different beast. So you could say it is this the weakest form of religion, or, at least, the religion with the fewest dependencies.
3) in practice, the edifice of science is quite full of people who are hypocritical and flagrantly breaking the rules which you expect would be necessary to maintain the high standard that marks the difference between religion and science. These violations are often swept under the rug quietly and even when they get really big the organization is incredibly good at closing its ranks. I'd say there are a lot of parallels between the science industrial complex and, highly organized religions (such as megachurches and hierarchical institutions like the Southern Baptist or Catholic Church) than most people who see science as a source of power ought to be comfortable with.