US man 'killed child by praying'

[C Elegans]

Over the years, I've come to grow very tired with the "science is a religion"-analogy, simply because it is incorrect. I absolutely do not understand the need for people to claim science is something different than it is. You may not like science for some personal reasons, but not liking it should not mean misclassifying it.

Per definition, religion must include belief in the transcendent, the "super natural". Science does not. Religious belief is based on faith, ie belief without evidence. Scientific beliefs must be evidence based, and evidence must hold certain characteristicts such as being objective, reproducible, have an explanatory as well as a predictive value etc.

First, logic and science are two different topics that differ the same way as mathematics and science. Science is experiment and evidence-based, not faith based. You believe in what you have evidence for and you stop believing if a hypothesis is falsified. Faith on the other hand, is belief without evidence and faith is not self-correcting and self-evaluation by the process of systematic observation, collection of evidence and falsification that is the core of science.
Logics and mathematics are something else, they deal with theoretical constructs and they are not defined as science.

Second, a scientist is a person with a certain education and profession. Being a scientist person does not mean you do everything in your personal life based on the scientific process. Because you are a physicist, you don't choose your partner based on science. Why would you? Thus, what an individual who has science as a profession, thinks about another individual, is totally irrelevant to the question of science. You are mixing things up here.

Scientists may make irrational personal choices in love life, have religious beliefs and subjective feelings that may influence their personal life. This however has nothing at all to do with science. Science is not the sum of what 10000 scientists are doing in their private lives. Science is a method for gaining factual knowledge, and that method is totally unrelated to the private lives and subjective emotions of scientists. That's one of the major points with the scientific method; it's independent of the individual and the individual's personal beliefs, biases and values. How you measure the energy of a particle and what score you get if you're a particle physicist, or how you quantify trait loci if you're a geneticist, has no relation whatsoever to your private relations to other private people. Individual experience, emotions, values and opinions do not change data. Nobody's opinions, personal beliefs or personal experience change the fact that the earth revolves around the sun or that a healthy human cell has 46 chromosomes.

Science and religion are more closely linked than you'd think...

Please explain how.

[Claudius]

word

[C Elegans]

yet individuals experience is important too.. and if not then what? Would science be important if individuals experience is not?

buddhism is not transcendent.

Individual experience is of course important, but not for the process of science. Individual experience may serve as part of an aim (ie decreased suffering for individuals with a particular disease) but it is not part of science as a discipline or the scientific process and it cannot serve as a valid outcome measurement since it is not objective. For instance, when you evaluate scientifically whether a treatment for a disease is successful or not, you may measure individual experience such as life quality or pain levels but the main factors measured has to be objective such as ability to work, decrease or abscence of symtoms, abscence of patogens etc.

In all forms of buddhism I am familiar with, Nirvana is a transcendent state.

[fable]

Science and religion are more closely linked than you'd think...

Do you mean the way faith was sometimes bolstered by weather-related phenomenon, which can be explained through science? Oracles pronouncing at the time of an eclipse, etc.

It's always seemed to me that science and religion have absolutely nothing to do with one another. Science is a study of the physical world. Religion is the reception of a metaphysical world. Problems occur, I think, when proponents of either try to mix in elements of the other.

[Bloodstalker]

I think that one dominant reason why people tend to put science in a similar catagory as religion is because, for a lot of people, they view scientists as just as dogmatic as religious people to a certain extent.

Now before anyone jumps me, let me explain what I mean. A lot of people don't view scientists so much as believing only what they can see and proves as they view them as dismissing anything that they can't scientifically prove as something that doesn't exist. This is really where a lot of religious people form their opinion of science I think. To many of them, just because science can't prove the existence of a diety doesn't mean that the diety doesn't exist. They generally point to the fact that in the past science couldn't prove that bacteria, atoms, and so on down the list existed either.

I think in some ways this is a misinterpretation of the scientific process. A scientist can't declare something unless they have documented proof. That's part of the profession, and to many people, it can seem close minded when a person doesn't even acknowlegde the possibility that perhaps they just have no way of measuring or determining certain things with current technology and procedures.

I think certain scientists contribute to this as well. Not all of them mind you, but every academic discipline has a number of stodgy, arrogant people who buy into their own intelligence and refuse to acknowledge that there is anything out there that doesn't confrom to what they think regardless of whether they can or cannot definatively prove it one way or the other. Like every other profession, they give the entire group a bad name. A lot of the time, people grab onto the worst representations of a community and base their entire opinion of the entire community on those members.

Sure, there are extremes out there on the religious side as well. I've never understood why anyone would feel they had to prove the existance of God anyway. Religion is a faith thing. And trying to realign things to fit into a religious view, like the dinsoaur thing, just makes religion look a lot more laughable to people who don't believe anyway. But I think a lot of the problem, for most people with the problem, is that they think there isn't really much difference in saying that something doesn't exist without proof as there is in saying something does exist without proof. Either way, it's an example to their minds of an ideology rather than a fact and that tends to make some people think of science in religious terms. In a lot of peoples minds, science is similar to a religion of disbelief as contrasted to religion being based on belief. I just don't think some people get the differences involved in comparing a religion to a profession.

[Ode to a Grasshopper]

Well said @BS.
The image of a diety (a weight-conscious deity perhaps?) gave me a giggle too...
"Let there be light salad dressing!"

[Xandax]

Science and religion are more closely linked than you'd think...

No they're really not. At least not until you can state why and how they would be?
They're vastly different concepts, and approaches to understanding.

[Tricky]

I don't know what he's talking about, but I can take a guess. His point has more to do with the philosophy and history of science than comparing modern day evolution theory to modern day creationism. Early sciences like ontology and cosmology originated from the earliest metaphysics. Heck, I'm not sure there even were agnostic scientists until the early 19th century. I'll have to look that up.

[Sain]

Science and religion are both answers to things that we otherwise cannot explain. Zeus has decided to have some fun/Friction heat energy caused by rain drops rubbing against other drops or the air, building up untill it discharges. God spending a good part of his week making man, earth and sky/An explosion at the center of the universe causing atoms to turn into molecules into cells into life. Being reicarnated into different beings dependant on how well you lived your life/Rotting in the ground, turning into plant food.

Man-kind has difficulty accepting that there are something that we cannot know, and figures that a wrong/poor/sad answer is better than none at all.

[Loki[D.d.G]]

Please explain how.

Missed this earlier, but lucky for me, BS saved me the typing and explained some of what I meant, or rather was trying to imply. Of course, I have other theories too, but I don't feel quite comfortable posting them without insulting the religious folk amongst us.