The West replaced God not with the self, but with shopping.
Sadly, this reflection is quickly forgotten.
Yes, there are issues, the incentivisation around publication etc makes it easy to game the system. However, to extrapolate this to a blanket attitude of distrusting science, "especially when it conflicts with one's own common sense", is incredibly dangerous because it's partly what has made large numbers of us so susceptible to overt manipulation.
"Common sense" is no such thing, and much of proven science could be construed as contradicting common sense. The light-speed limit, quantum spookiness, spacetime curvature, biological evolution - all were once considered contrary to "common sense" - mainly because "common sense" is ultimately derived from the extremely narrow and limited range of human experiences.
It's not about trusting or distrusting "science," it's about trusting or distrusting people who put too much trust into "science," on the principle of it being "science" that "scientists" have determined is truth. I'm not saying let's all go full Amish (or Kaczynski) and live off the land, I write code for a living. I'm just saying that it's easy to fall into the "religion is an old and outdated concept, only idiots and traditionalist fools would believe in such a thing, yet putting complete faith in anything said by anyone who calls themselves a 'scientist' that gets sufficient attention, that's completely totally different, Because Science" trap.
So yes, I would argue that even if someone doesn't understand all the scientific principles behind climate change, they can still reasonably trust "science" and "scientists", since that work is built on top of empirically-backed, peer-evaluated research. In fact, this is necessary since the expertise required to have a critical opinion of the vast majority of scientific research is well beyond us.
Imagine trying to convince someone of incredible religious conviction that their earthly Church demonstrably has repeatedly fallen victim to corruption over the years, only to have her respond to you with, "but that can't be; the Word of God is unquestionably infallible!" There shouldn't be any problem in holding both of those ideas ("the Word of God (Bible) is literally Gospel and infallibly true" and "absolute power corrupts man") in your head at the same time (if anything, the former explicitly reinforces the latter!), and you'd be hard-pressed to find a Catholic today that won't admit that their earthly Church hasn't gone through periods of incredible corruption and downright evil.
Nobody's going to argue the validity of the scientific method, but when you look at the innate nature of man (demonstrated time and again over the course of all recorded history), it's easy to believe that modern "science" is just as corrupt as any other institution man has made at any point in time that rose to power in the minds of the people, i.e. "very"
Both are institutions constructed by greedy, corrupt, stupid, fallible human beings. It's just that the latter has built in several mechanisms to address this. Like science.
So over a long period of time, democracies have proven to be less corrupt then monarchies, and like-wise, science has proven to be less wrong then religion.
But even putting that aside, and accepting for sake of the argument that the political system in use in countries such as the United States is a "democracy" ...still, yes. Did political corruption magically disappear overnight when we stopped being ruled by monarchs? Were all monarchies corrupt to begin with?
"Democracy is to monarchy as science is to religion" is an incredibly muddled comparison that does not make much sense when you break it down. Modern Christianity would not be where it is today without Protestantism questioning core fundamental beliefs and then-current leadership. When does what is accepted as "Science" get to have its version of Protestantism, questioning not just the dogma of "settled science" (the most hilarious oxymoron of all time), but those who spread it to the masses as well?
Why is it that Christians, even Catholics have no problem admitting to the fallibility of what they consider to be their holiest of institutions, yet atheists seem to believe that "science" is inherently always impossible to be anything but utterly pure use of the scientific method conducted with nothing but the utmost honesty, at every level?
The motivations of man are not always pure, especially when in positions of power and/or authority. Even if you want to disregard religion entirely, at least take lessons from the history it has given us.
Science had its "protestant" moment - it was called the Enlightenment, and it result from questioning the dogma of settled knowledge as promulgated by religions through the infallibility of scripture.
I'm not knowledgeable about philosophy or metaphysics but is there even anything approaching consensus on whether or not there even is a "knowledge ceiling" that an individual or even society could ever achieve? (If so, I'd love to know how anyone came to that conclusion lol)
>Science had its "protestant" moment - it was called the Enlightenment, and it result from questioning the dogma of settled knowledge as promulgated by religions through the infallibility of scripture.
You seem to have misunderstood the analogy I was making. I'm a practicing Roman Catholic, yet view Protestantism as having been a positive thing for Christianity as a whole, including Roman Catholicism. When is dogmatic belief in whatever passes for "science" these days going to be scrutinized? Systemic corruption of any sufficiently powerful institution of man is inevitable, and just because the scientific method is about as pure of a means of reasoning about the world around us as we can come up with and has led to profound advancements in technology and our understanding of our world... doesn't mean that everyone's just going to ignore the fact that using the now-widespread dogmatic belief in its infallibility is a pretty powerful means of achieving external political and personal goals unrelated to the pursuit of truth. It's naive to think otherwise.
Yes, agreed that human systems have a tendency to corruption, however the scientific method at least has within it the seeds to "keep the bastards honest" (as we say where I come from). i.e.
1. Nothing stops you from learning and becoming a scientist. 2. Nothing stops you from attempting to repeat published experiments, or if you can't, then to point out why (which are likely to be faults in either the description or execution of the original experiment).
In other words, there is transparency and a basis for objective comparison. Lack of transparency (either through gatekeeping or lack of detail) is considered a bad sign in science. That's what differentiates the scientific method, from say, the "political method", or "the religious method".
As a system, science has brought about a better understanding of the physical world around us and has dramatically improved the lives of every human on the planet.
1. It places empirical observation as the ultimate form of evidence, as opposed to scripture/existing knowledge.
If you observe something that contradicts existing theories and other people can make that observation then existing theories are disproven, the end. This still takes time to propagate, but really only for highly complicated abstract theories(of which climate change might be one!)
2. Science has a built in competitive market type process for selecting 'scripture' and an incentive to constantly be updating it.
Religions have more bureaucratic/despotic approaches to updating knowledge(college of cardinals/pope, influential preachers etc).
3. The core questions science tackles are physical and amenable to observation and maths. The core questions religion tackles are metaphysical, or to put them in evo-psych terms to do with selecting and reproducing rules of behavior that produce good societies in which to live over tens/hundreds of generations.
In as much as science tries to enter into that hyper-long term planning game it should be treated with extreme suspicion, it's a different statistical environment to that of physics and the existing statistical tools of science are probably not up to the task. It's the land of Taleb's fat tails and iterated games and exponential chaos, not statistically modelable quantum experiments(top pick a complicated but tractable problem).
Shitty metaphor: Hard sciences are about solving P problems, or at worst approximating NP or worse, but still computable, problems. Religion and social science are about providing heuristics to uncomputable problems(if you have a C program and all it does is return then it definitely halts etc). In as much as people take the NP approximations as seriously as the P solutions, they're in for some rude awakenings. In as much as a lot of our society does then we're in for a bumpy ride.
Let's break it down into a few constituent parts. We have a thing (scripture / spiritual belief OR the scientific method as applied to the world). Then, nasty, messy fallible people who probably don't floss... do stuff with that thing: they teach it, they do it, they investigate it in their own messy wayd. And then regular joe-schmo's who aren't so involved in the doing-something-with-the-thing get reallll impressed by these doing-stuff people (priests/rabbis/gurus whatever OR scientists of all sorts).
Okay, well here's the thing. I agree that everybody is messy and fallible. I agree that hand-wavy "Science people are right!" talk is wrong, imprecise and has potential to be harmful. At the same time, I believe in the scientific-method-applied-to-the-world. I believe in its power to reveal truth. I do not have that same belief in scripture-or-organized-religion-applied-to-the-world. And I think that's REALLY important. Of course people do stupid things and make mistakes, but when someone puts blind faith in people-trying-to-adhere-to-science, it scares me a lot less than when someone puts blind faith in people-trying-to-adhere-to-a-religion. In fact, I'd much rather people put blind faith in "scientists" than in... any other type of group, really, at least when it comes to revealing knowledge.
Hopefully that made sense, if anyone has thoughts or disagrees, I'm more than happy to hear it.
Yes, day to day there's a certain level of trust put in what scientists say based on their research, everyone can't know everything, but it's not blind faith. With priests, ultimately there's an expectation of belief without evidence.
An alternative would be a community-outlook. I am part of a greater whole. I don't really own anything. We are living a story, together.