Science as Faith
I was listening to an episode of the Geologic Podcast today, and on it George Hrab used the recent news about Triceratops 1 to launch into a rant about how science and faith are different.
- TRICERATOPS AND TOROSAURUS: SAME DINOSAUR, http://news.discovery.com/dinosaurs/triceratops-and-torosaurus-same-dinosaur.html [ ↩]
Imagine some triceratops denialists coming into play now, saying, ‘No, we’ve always had torosaurs, we always will have torosaurs. I know deep in my soul that torosaurs existed. I just know that they’re a seperate species. I’ve always known it. I was raised believing, and I was taught, that torosaurs and triceratops were seperate species.’ 1
Somehow, those arguments sounded eerily familiar. They seemed very similar to things that people said when it was declared that Pluto was no longer a planet. I don’t think we’re going to see those kinds of sentiment here, but only because everyone knows and loves Triceratops, and no one really cares about Torosaurus. If they had decided to name the species Torosaurus and gotten rid of the Triceratops, people would be up in arms.
Now I don’t believe that science is a form of faith 2, but I can’t help but wonder if, for the majority of people, science is taken as a kind of faith.
I read a blog posting on Science Blogs to that effect (which I can’t for the life of me seem to locate), and I was skeptical when I read it. It seemed to me that believing in scientific consensus is still a more valid way to look at the world than blind faith, so long as you understand the process of generating a scientific consensus. But now I’m finding myself questioning whether people do understand the process of science. For most people, is science a set of facts that you memorize during school? If so, how is that different from the set of facts that they memorize during church? It’s easy to see how they could feel that science is the same kind of thing as religion.
Is science a kind of faith for most of the general public, and if so, how can that change? Would it help to teach the scientific process, rather than scientific facts? That’s something that I doubt will be coming any time soon, so I’m not really sure what to say on the subject.
- George Hrab, Geologic Podcast, Episode #177, http://www.geologicpodcast.com/the_geologic_podcast_episode_177 [ ↩]
- For good summaries of why I don’t, see the articles on the subject by Phil Plait and Eliezer_Yudkowsky [ ↩]
Crossposted on Indentured Mind