Is science a religion?
The first lie I intend to expose is definitely a favorite. Theist who try to live by rules and information from a book that is millennia old are, inevitably, going to run into conflicts as our understanding grows beyond what the men who wrote said book knew. However, many religious folks have taken the approach of “if you can’t beat them, join them” or more accurately, make them join you. They have decided that since they can’t beat science, they should just try to make science look like it is just any old ideology, no better than the one that they are trying to propagate.
This lie takes on many forms but goes something like this: “Science is just a religion” or “Science requires just as much (or more) faith as my religion”.
This is just another way in which people dilute the meaning of words so that they become meaningless. I’ve talked to people who tried to use this argument on me before and my question to them is always “can you define faith”. My definition of faith is pretty simple, accepting a claim as true without evidence or in the face of contradictory evidence. This is also the definition of faith that EVERY Christian I have ever had the displeasure of talking to uses by the end of their argument when they have lost on every other front. The dreaded “Well, you’ve just got to have faith”, i.e. “I don’t have a good reason, I just want to believe it”. Yes, I’m ashamed to say that I’ve used it myself many times when I was a Christian. But every time I’ve had this particular argument with a Christian, they define faith differently. They have to in order to make science fit the definition of faith because in reality, science is the antithesis of faith.
Lets compare and contrast science and religion a little bit.
Some religious person makes a claim about God. A religious leader is consulted (i.e. the Pope or some other church leader). The church leader declares the claim as true or false and everyone is expected to accept unquestioningly this ruling.
Vs.
Some scientist makes a claim about some aspect of the observable universe. This claim is expected, by the scientific community, to be laid out with evidence and the procedures used to evaluate the evidence. Other scientist review and replicate the experiment and results. If the experiments are replicable and a through review by the scientific community confirms the findings, the claim becomes accepted science. But that is not the end. Later, new information may require revisiting the original claim to make modifications. It never becomes unquestionable.
Science is not a faith and science is not a religion. Science is the method that we use to understand the reality that we exist in. Even religious people use it in every other aspect of their life. It isn’t simply faith that lets you know that you still have to stop when the light is red or that the sun will rise in the morning. That is science. Religious people don’t use faith to decide whether or not to loan money to a stranger. They use credit reports. That is science. In every other aspect of life, even religious people will differ to science over faith. That alone should be enough to tell you that there must be something to this science stuff, maybe it has more to offer me than faith. But that is only true if you prefer reality to fantasy.