There is a subtle but critical difference between belief in science and belief in religion.
Religion - Trust and have faith.
Science - Trust but verify.
I’ve got significant training in science. Even I can’t follow and verify every advance in every field. I have to trust that they are applying the scientific method properly.
That trust is backed with teeth however. If needed, I can bring myself up to speed in a field. I can verify what they claim makes sense. I can also (in theory) run the same experiments to test their work.
Further to that, I know other scientists are doing exactly that. Both in the form of reading the paper, with a sufficient knowledge base to criticise it, and by repeating the actual experiment. This discourages fraud, as well as weeding out poor research.
On top of all this, science forms a web. No scientific theory, work or idea stands in isolation, they all interlink. Because of this, once you have enough knowledge, you can often spot the mismatched strands. These indicate one of 2 things. Either that particular paper is wrong, or something very interesting is going on. Either way, it’s worth some more attention. This is how many scientists can dismiss poor or controversial “research”. It mismatches with well verified work, and doesn’t have the data to back up such a mistake being the case.
This web is the basis of scientific consensus. The consensus is the current best understanding of the universe that we have. We know it’s not correct however, it has flaws. As science works, those flaws get filled in. Eventually, some of them get enough weight of research and data that they become accepted as part of the consensus. Very rarely, entire areas of the web get shown to be false (or more generally incomplete). This can lead to large and rapid changes to our understanding. These are extremely rare however, and not something to be accepted lightly.
I want to add a fundamental difference in the way science and religion handle being proven wrong: In science I would say that the only “fundamental truth” is “anything and everything I think I know could be wrong”. In religion it’s the polar opposite: “What I believe is the truth, the whole truth and the only truth”.
Thus, when a scientific theory is shown to not match reality, that doesn’t challenge a scientist’s fundamental world view, in fact it backs it up.
To me, that is what fundamentally separates science from other approaches to understanding the world (i.e. religion): If your most basic truth is that you can never truly know anything for sure, then no evidence can ever come into conflict with you world view. This leads scientists to accept new models and evidence, while religions prefer to reject evidence.
There is a subtle but critical difference between belief in science and belief in religion.
Religion - Trust and have faith.
Science - Trust but verify.
I’ve got significant training in science. Even I can’t follow and verify every advance in every field. I have to trust that they are applying the scientific method properly.
That trust is backed with teeth however. If needed, I can bring myself up to speed in a field. I can verify what they claim makes sense. I can also (in theory) run the same experiments to test their work.
Further to that, I know other scientists are doing exactly that. Both in the form of reading the paper, with a sufficient knowledge base to criticise it, and by repeating the actual experiment. This discourages fraud, as well as weeding out poor research.
On top of all this, science forms a web. No scientific theory, work or idea stands in isolation, they all interlink. Because of this, once you have enough knowledge, you can often spot the mismatched strands. These indicate one of 2 things. Either that particular paper is wrong, or something very interesting is going on. Either way, it’s worth some more attention. This is how many scientists can dismiss poor or controversial “research”. It mismatches with well verified work, and doesn’t have the data to back up such a mistake being the case.
This web is the basis of scientific consensus. The consensus is the current best understanding of the universe that we have. We know it’s not correct however, it has flaws. As science works, those flaws get filled in. Eventually, some of them get enough weight of research and data that they become accepted as part of the consensus. Very rarely, entire areas of the web get shown to be false (or more generally incomplete). This can lead to large and rapid changes to our understanding. These are extremely rare however, and not something to be accepted lightly.
I want to add a fundamental difference in the way science and religion handle being proven wrong: In science I would say that the only “fundamental truth” is “anything and everything I think I know could be wrong”. In religion it’s the polar opposite: “What I believe is the truth, the whole truth and the only truth”.
Thus, when a scientific theory is shown to not match reality, that doesn’t challenge a scientist’s fundamental world view, in fact it backs it up.
To me, that is what fundamentally separates science from other approaches to understanding the world (i.e. religion): If your most basic truth is that you can never truly know anything for sure, then no evidence can ever come into conflict with you world view. This leads scientists to accept new models and evidence, while religions prefer to reject evidence.