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Comment by dymk | Hacker News Reader

Religion and science derive understanding about the world in fundamentaly different and incompatible ways. To call it religion is just incorrect.

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As a scientist here's my take: 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.

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.

Yup, academia is outrageously political.

> 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.

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.

Science is just systematic problem solving. It is a very unremarkable thing. When people build it up to something more than that, then it takes on aspects of religion.

A scientist doing science isn't religion. A non-scientist believing everything someone says "because science" is.

> Religion and science derive understanding about the world in fundamentaly different and incompatible ways.

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.

An alternative idea is that the pope is only saying that so the science-minded folks don't leave.

Fundamentally, I see religion as an enterprise that defines the structure of existence (metaphysics), explains how humans in their "base state" are deficient within that structure, to their detriment and that of others, and finally establishes elaborate practices for addressing the deficiency.

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 could stretch it to say that climate science exactly 'defines the structure of existence (metaphysics), explains how humans in their "base state" are deficient within that structure, to their detriment and that of others, and finally establishes elaborate practices for addressing the deficiency' - except that the practices, so far, don't actually address the deficiency adequately.

I will agree that I don't see this structure elsewhere in science...

Perhaps not, but I definitely see a lot of things analogous that in politics.

Thomas Kuhn would disagree.

Really meaning to read "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" at some point. I had a philosophy professor in college who was all about that guy. Definitely shaped my worldview to some extent.

One thing I found very valuable in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a quick shortcut to telling if a field is doing "normal science" or not. If students are taught with textbooks distilling the field's important insights in a readable form then it probably is. The originator of an important idea is rarely the most skilled at expressing it to newcomers, but if your field can't tell if a rephrasing of an idea is still true or if it is more concerned with the prestige of the founders than the amassing of truth then it will tend to use original texts.

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