However, for the average person, a dogmatic belief in the scientific method would be a huge step up over religion.
The same is true of pure knowledge. You introduce a new paradigm. You don't know how it will effect all the other knowledge that depends on it. Once it's adopted careers of many scientists depend on it... it's only after those scientists die and a new paradigm is found that the next generation can build its career on that old knowledge dies.
None of this is due to wisdom. It's just the way the political economy works. Wisdom only applies to individual action about things that have a small enough scope to have some idea about their impact on decisions. For anything bigger than that, it's political... and I highly doubt the crowds have wisdom especially about untested things.
What other areas of inquiry would that be?
This is a lot more like science then the usual default of blaming and assumptions and implicit expectations that most people conduct their relationships in.
I find it helps keep me sane.
I wonder how many arguments would be defused if both sides could phrase the other side's point of view in a way they would agree was accurately stated.
If you have found it a useful communicative tool, then I am glad for you. No doubt communication can be hard, so we've gotta use whatever tools we find effective. But honestly when I try speaking like that, I can't help but feel like a robot or a program. It feels very unnatural and very awkward to me. Perhaps that distance is exactly what lends it efficacy for some people, but that very distance only lends it offputticacy for me.
Am I right and you wrong? No, I don't think so. I have no reason to doubt that you have found success with such an approach. But were I a barkeep and you a patron responding like that when asked "why the long face?", you'd be getting a double of tequila on the house. (Tequila has a funny way of bringing out one's inner party, in my experience—or getting one started where there's yet only a quiet inner evening get-together).
Communication like that can be very helpful when dealing with personal conflict -- marriage, friendships, etc., but I can't see how that would help in the public sphere.
If a political opponent, writer, or public speaker were to say or write something like that, it would be irritating and off-putting. I'd think "OK, but what's your point?"
... That would be inappropriate, unhelpful, and unproductive. It would be better to engage with the opponent’s argument with another argument than to resort to talking about personal feelings in that context.
I find the distance, that analysing behaviour brings, actually helps with the patience, and compassion (if they're having a weird tantrum because they wanted something trivial). I also think it keeps me motivated in consciously raising my kids, rather than just passively whiling away the years.
Maybe I have younger kids, so there aren't really any philosophical issues being raised.
The entire area of nutrition and weight management is a joke. Medicine is problematic and Psychology is questionable.
Another problem is that the popular media publishes inconclusive studies because they are click bait. People read them because they are interested in living longer and losing weight and being happy.
Fear also turns studies into clickbait. The latest was the blizzard of articles on if bugs are dying off or not.
Then there is the fact that negative studies tend to be ignored and when the study failed or it introduces data that does not conform to general knowledge.
All this makes people question studies where the data is conclusive.
Note that the issue is that there is a human in that system.
The problem is that we (rightfully!) don't easily allow experiments on humans that might be harmful.
And, as an aside, nutrition and weight management does have people doing real science (things like studies of hunter gatherer societies with deuterated water), it's just that the results aren't very flashy (ie. a human burns roughly the same amount of calories regardless of activity level--so the only way to lose weight is to eat less--moving more is healthy but doesn't contribute substantially to weight loss).
Here is an interesting Stanford Medicine study of individual variation on the impact on low carb vs low fat. The punchline is that they still don't know after a fairly rigorous study.
Psychiatrists paved the way for the Holocaust:
Many common points exist - showing your reasoning and evidence rather than to appeal to authority, and the idea that hypotheses should be falsifialbe (in the sense of Thomas Kuhn) to be central ideas. Both of these very good idea in all situations in which you're actually interested in the truth, rather than having a shoot-first-ask-questions-later situation where you need to act on imperfect information.
There's no disaster waiting to happen, at least not in comparison to other tools of reasoning being misused. Sophism (i.e. people playing mind games to make their claims look better) exists inside and outside of science, just as self-interest and wanting to increase your own sphere of influence do, but that's no fault of the scientific method (any more than it is a fault of religion when it occurs there). Any system that lends credibility and authority to people will (loosely mis-citing Bourdieu) attract power-mongery.
A scientist doing science isn't religion. A non-scientist believing everything someone says "because science" is.
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.
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.
Perhaps you can find something analogous to this structure in psychology, but I just don't see it in the rest of the scientific landscape.
I will agree that I don't see this structure elsewhere in science...
They are not incompatible, as the pope John Paul II states: Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.
Afterwards students were discouraged from original thought around logic and just forced to learn the following mnemoic
Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque prioris. Cesare, Camestres, Festino, Baroco secundae. Tertia Darapti, Disamis, Datisi, Felapton, Bocardo, Ferison habet. Quarta insuper addit Bramantip, Camenes, Dimaris, Fesapo, Fresison.
Scholasticism then went onto have terrible connotations as a scholarly system.
For the average person to look at the scientific method, conclude it (at least mostly) works and believe in the fundamentals of the process, I think, is a good thing.
But the scientific method is based on the idea of an unchanging God / reality. Without that fundamental belief, theres no point in determining how physics behaves in an experiment, because if everything happens at the whims of anthropomorphic gods, then there is no reason to expect the same experiment will produce similar results.
Thus, I don't really see the huge step up, especially given the inhumanity science has sometimes promulgated, and for which it frankly gets a free pass.
Written by Albert Einstein
Some other quotes:
"The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition."
"Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion."
"His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages."
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." -- Albert Einstein, 1954, letter to Joseph Dispentiere.
Scientific methods differ a lot between the sciences - especially between the physical and special sciences, for example.
"Some philosophers and scientists have argued that there is no scientific method; they include physicist Lee Smolin and philosopher Paul Feyerabend (in his Against Method)"
And even the previous paragraphs are not complete either. It says there:
"Scientists then test hypotheses by conducting experiments or studies. A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable"
Which is not necessarily true - for example, many arguments against the theory of evolution question whether it is a falsifiable theory (which is not saying that it is not true, but if there is no way to falsify it, how can it be said it is a scientific theory?). Many fields within Biology also have no predictive, but only descriptive power.
Scientists who stick to a rigorous scientific method, such as seen in physics would have to reject most other branches of science. For a realist to accept scientific results in multiple fields, they have to use some philosophical reasons to accept the differing methods as valid ways of exploring reality.
The “theory of evolution” is a large composite explanatory story wrapped around a large number of testable (mostly thoroughly tested) hypotheses. It's falsifiable by falsifying any of the components, though the replacement is liable to look remarkably similar but for who the falsified piece is addressed, and still likely to be called the “theory of evolution” even though the content is different.
Some philosophers argue that all the subsets of evolution - genetics, mutations, natural selection could still support permanence of species with local changes. Until you can create an entirely new species in a laboratory without direct gene editing, there cannot be positive proof for evolution - but till that is done, there is no negative test that would disprove that evolution is the consequence of all its component hypotheses.
Personally, I don't see any reason to doubt evolution, considering it is neat and beautiful. But at the same time, I can see that it hasn't been built via the same scientific method seen in physics.
Being able to do that is no more positive proof of evolution than any of the more or practical tests. Also, speciation has been observed and created in controlled settings without direct gene editing (indeed, some before gene editing was even a thing), so if it was positive proof of evolution, we could mark that off as proven absolutely.
This would be fine. But this is not what people mean when they say "science is real." They mean: "Believe what scientists say," and the definition of a scientist is... a person with a post-graduate degree that is popular on Facebook, probably, like Neil deGrasse Tyson.