Hence, if any authority, 'scientific' or otherwise, asserts their authority instead of providing individually verifiable evidence of its claims, then we can say they are being unscientific, regardless of title.
The difference between scientific and religious institutions is not that the former functions without authority or trust, it's that the success of the former is measured against observable and replicable results and material progress and not based on infallible spiritual promise.
So if someone understands nothing about science at all, and worships it like a religion, at least they had the good sense of picking a religion that puts food on their table, makes their planes stay in the sky and makes them healthy again when they fall sick.
Religion has proven capable of welding large communities together, and that sort of shared belief system wins wars.
If you ignore the fact that the doctrine is more allegorical than factual, religion has a lot of utility when resources are scarce. Being part of a large group is frequently more important than being part of a technically correct group.
I think the last 200 years of history has demonstrated that science is a superior strategy, but it isn't obvious enough to be hand-waved. There is some evidence that to successfully abandon religion societies have to first have an ungodly surplus of resources. The new trend towards no religion hasn't been tested in a war yet either; back in WWII religious/nationalistic sentiment was famously high.
It may be true that our current scientific culture arose from religion, but it's easy to imagine it arising separately. There are even countless stories of times when scientific progress was hindered by religious thinking, situations where people tried to fit their ideas to some religious story and in doing so blocked their progress towards truth.
In addition to that, even if religion was a necessary prerequisite for modern science and we take that science is 'good', that does not mean religion is good. "The USA came about (in part) due to the use of slaves, take away slavery and we wouldn't have the USA" is not a good argument for slavery.
A side note, but the world is not really orderly, though maybe it is understandable. If anything, the world is filled with death, pain, and chaos; if any mind created it, it's a sadistic one.
Atheists were science blockers in Plato's day. They were called sophists, and didn't believe in gods, but used the beliefs of the people and fancy rhetoric to get what they want. Most of Plato's dialogues are debates with sophists.
You claimed that science exists because of religion, but did not show that religion is a requirement (or even catalyst) for science.
Organised science definitely requires a society (otherwise it would not be organised) and it so happens that historical societies tended to have some association with religion, but I would claim science arose from these societies despite religion, not because of it.
If science was an outworking of religion, rather than the society a religion happens to cohabit, why do we not see more and more science coming from societies with more and more religion?
> Atheists were science blockers in Plato's day. They were called sophists, and didn't believe in gods, but used the beliefs of the people and fancy rhetoric to get what they want. Most of Plato's dialogues are debates with sophists.
Sorry, not sure what the link here is.
Atheism is just not believing in gods, in the same way I don't believe we are living in a simulation. Even if the premise is true, as far as we can measure (so far!) there is no impact on us. Not believing in things that we can't experience or measure is the default for us in general.
I would go so far as to say that religions themselves only exist because we were trying to explain the world we live in, and were unable to with the tools and ideas available to us throughout history. Over the course of history many people have observed the same phenomena and come up with a multitude of ideas as to what is going on.
Many of those ideas go on to form the nexus of a religion, many hundreds or thousands of religions trying to make sense of the world. The ideas that hold up to interrogation, that are testable and can be observed repeatably, they become science. Science reduces the set of possible explanations to the ones that are feasible.
Didn't Aristotle basically say a projectile will move in a straight line until it basically "runs out of gas," even though everyone who's ever thrown something can see that's not true, just because he thought it ought to work that way?
Lets take in mind that we talk about a man, one single man with not much more than a deductive and logical brain. No fancy lab apparatus or computers here.
This man was hugely influential in logic. Created the sillogisms and developped one of the first logical syntaxes based in the concepts of true and false. "if A is P (is true) and P is C (is true); then A is C". relationships among true and false in double negatives, predicates, etc.
Lay the foundations of economy as a science and economic though. We call it "economy" because one of his disciples coined the term.
Hugely influencial in occidental medicine. Medicine must be evidence-based, deterring magical procedures.
So called the "father of biology". Wrote the first comprehensive treatise about zoology, covering and classifying more than 500 animals. Wrote a similar treatise about botany (mostly lost if i'm not wrong)
Hugely influencial in development of embryology and teratology. Described systematically the development of embryo in chicken and other animals. Developped laws about gestation time and clutch size related with size of animals that are still vigent.
(Most probably) the first cephalopologist or marine biologist. Described the hectocotylus in octopuses and explained his function.
Deducted correctly that all things in the space were moving in closed orbits. Was wrong about putting earth in the center of all universe, and though that orbits were circular; but to be fair the first telescope wouldn't be invented until, dunno, more than 1500 years later or so.
Introduced the phylosophical concept of first motor, "if there is movement in the universe and all that moves is pushed by another moving object, there must be a first cause for the movement of all the planets and things in the universe". The pale ghost of this concept can be still invoked if you repeat "Big bang" six times in front of a telescope's mirror.
Not to mention the thousands of his phylosofical quotes that are fondly repeated still today in lots of powerpoint presentations and motivational posters all around the world.
"It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light" Harvey Dent? not, Aristotle.
All in just a man's life. The man was wrong in many things, but was incredibly smart, influential and prolific.
If you're talking about wars, you really think a hypothetical civilization with a technological development level of ca.1819 would have even a sliver of a chance against modern weapons?? I think history shows that not to be the case.
But I think that misses the point. The real issue is that the world doesn't care what your belief system is. You may have the most solid shared belief system ever, but if you ruin your environment, a la "Collapse", you won't stand a chance.
However there needs to be a stable society to host the researchers (using the term loosely to include people who invent stuff). That is possible with extreme ethnic homogeneity, possible with strong shared religion and culture and possible with conducive economic conditions where everyone benefits from pulling together.
It isn't obvious that 'science' can fill that role if it displaces religion and we go through 20 years of hard times. A cynic's read of science would support the idea that we stab the neighbor when the going gets tough. Eugenics, for example, was once considered the scientific option until WWII happened, there was a lot of interest in the early statistical community in that sort of thing. Some bits worked, some didn't, but the experience doesn't paint 'the scientific approach' as beyond moral question - there was lot of suffering and some very divisive ideas came to fruition.
I agree with you insofar that if people are living hand-to-mouth it's very hard to achieve scientific progress just because there is not enough time.
In general however this does not require a stable society, just that there are people within the society who have time to think and the resources to test their ideas. We've seen this in the past when 'rich' people sponsor someone to do 'science' even though in general the population is living hand-to-mouth, and we've seen it recently in Europe where science continued even though the land was being torn up by war.
That said, for large scale, wide spread advancement you obviously want more people able to contribute, so a stable society definitely helps with this.
> That is possible with extreme ethnic homogeneity, possible with strong shared religion and culture and possible with conducive economic conditions where everyone benefits from pulling together.
I agree that these things can lead to a stable society, with the correction "religion or culture", but actually think there is something more fundamental going on.
> It isn't obvious that 'science' can fill that role if it displaces religion and we go through 20 years of hard times. A cynic's read of science would support the idea that we stab the neighbor when the going gets tough.
First of all, it's not necessary for 'science' to fill this role, culture is already a fine fit. Indeed, the cases you probably think of when saying religion can form a stable society are better explained with culture (of which religion or religious observances may be a part), especially when we consider the many conflicts in history between groups of people who claim the same religion but have different culture.
Furthermore, 'science' doesn't say anything like "stab your neighbour when the going gets tough". One of the prevailing theories around the question of "why do we cooperate" is that cooperating is more economical, and societies that cooperate are more likely to survive. It is a self selecting trait of successful societies. Individuals within a society may choose to act in uncooperative ways, but even if I thought I could improve my lot in life by stealing from my neighbours, I'm able to recognise that if everyone acted like that it would be bad for me personally. Culture and law - cultural memes, these are the elements of a society that lead to it being stable.
> Eugenics, for example, was once considered the scientific option until WWII happened, there was a lot of interest in the early statistical community in that sort of thing. Some bits worked, some didn't, but the experience doesn't paint 'the scientific approach' as beyond moral question - there was lot of suffering and some very divisive ideas came to fruition.
There are not many people who believe any human endeavour is beyond moral question, but especially not science! Insofar as we can call 'science' the modern organised research institutions, we have entire systems set in place exactly because we (humanity) believe that some things are not worth knowing if you can't discover them without human suffering, or 'not immorally' for whatever we find immoral.
That is to say, 'science' doesn't dictate how we structure our lives or behave ourselves, we do. The institutions we build and the cultures that persist are what lead to stable societies, but it's much easier to make good decisions when you have more knowledge.
Your phrasing makes it sound like you're conflating science and physical reality... that's kind of a pet peeve of mine (sorry). Science provides some of the knowledge required for engineers and doctors to do their jobs, but it's the work they do with that knowledge that accomplishes those things. I think that's an important distinction. We can't credit science with creating the natural world or its mechanisms, though it has enabled us to understand and work with it.
However, in general discussion no one is going to say
> "potentially flawed but workable approximation of natural 'rules' that allow us to to manipulate natural phenomenon in a manner that results in food on our table, planes in your sky, and cures for our sicknesses"
No, it's much more reasonable to say
> science that puts food on our table, planes in our sky, and cures for our sicknesses
I know it is... hence the apology.
But in practice, I don't think it would be inaccurate to say the terms "science" and "natural world" are being used interchangeably in common vernacular. That bugs me. "Science" is not what you see when you look through a telescope or microscope.
Really, it doesn't. Science is exactly the process that does all those things, because science is the process which forms the methods and artifacts we use in such a way that they successfully exploit the mechanisms of the natural world.
> but it's the work they do with that knowledge that accomplishes those things
That is an obviously nonsensical statement. Yes, that work is a component of accomplishing those things, but so is the science. An engineer or doctor that did not use scientific results nor scientific methodology would not accomplish anything either. And arguably, what engineers and doctors do, when done right, is also science. An engineer building a plane is building a (physically represented) hypothesis of how something can be made to fly, and then tests that hypothesis. The only difference between what you would call a scientist and what you would call an engineer is the generalized applicability of their result, not the fundamental methodology they are using to arrive at that result--in particular in comparison to the "alternative", namely a faith-based epistemology, which is what is generally proposed by those sceptical of the scientific method.
It is no longer fine when public policy decisions potentially costing trillions of dollars and affecting billions of people are riding on scientific conclusions. Then the claim that "well, we're just discovering facts about the world" no longer holds water. Nor does the claim that "well, science requires institutions, trust, and authority, so just trust us, the scientists". Members of the public have to be able to independently evaluate the claims so they can make informed decisions about what public policies to support.
Indeed, the motto of the Royal Society is "Take nobody's word for it".