Be careful, your love of science looks a lot like religion
Seeing the light. (Reuters/Daniel Aguilar)
By Jamie Holmes
5 hours ago
Scientific beliefs are destined to supersede and replace primitive religious views, once argued 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte. His scientific positivism birthed today’s scientism: the notion that science has exclusive access to the truth.
“Science” is usually equated by proponents of this view with empiricism or, in many fields, with a method of inquiry that employs controls, blinding, and randomization. Now, a small group of contemporary psychologists have published a series of provocative experiments showing that faith in science can serve the same mentally-stabilizing function as religious beliefs.
In 2013, a study published in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that when subjects were stressed, they were more likely to agree to statements typifying scientism such as, “the scientific method is the only reliable path to knowledge.” When people felt anxious, they esteemed science more highly than calmer subjects did, just as previous experiments have shown to be the case with religious ideals. Deep faith in science is sometimes just another form of (irrational) extremism.
Another study led by University of Amsterdam’s Bastiaan Rutjens in 2010 found that uncertain subjects expressed an increased faith in God or in evolution, provided that evolution was presented as a structured and predictable process.
http://qz.com/476722/be-careful-your-love-of-science-looks-a-lot-like-religion/
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103113001042
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103110001605
= new reply since forum marked as read
That's the downside because it entails "for many it isn't."
Catholicism has a standard definition and practice. It has a theology, catechism, set of doctrines, a standard of (ideal) behavior.
Science is a process, a way of viewing the world; it's also a set of facts, with proper organization; it's codified as a set of theories and working hypotheses that are subject to testing and disconfirmation.
I know few "good Catholics": few have worked through the catechism and remember it, few understand more than the rudiments of its theology or doctrines, and many have their ideal behavioral norms at odds with the official norms. Catholicism has nothing to do with many practices common among Catholics in the West, which people are happy to call compatible with Catholicism. We let the masses define the system for us.
I know few non-scientists who "get" science. Even people like nurses get it wrong. The gen ed science course in college isn't enough. For them, science is a bunch of facts and doctrines. You don't have to understand evolution to believe in it, but without understanding the reasoning, observational base, and the way it's been tested it's a belief. We have ritualistic science demonstrations that prove to the pious that their way is true, but they don't link observation and theory because that requires more data than we can provide, analysis of error, and some way to generalize that data (the cult language, "math"
.
Because it's a belief, when facts or theories ("hypotheses" to the initiated) change it's like changing a doctrine in a church: it results in disillusionment. When journal results are fabricated, it's like having a prelate be publicly hypocritical. For those who are good practioners of science, these things happen. But for believers in science, they become agnostics or even atheists.
For science, we refuse to let the masses define the system for us. But for many of the populace science really is a set of doctrines to be blindly accepted for tests and degree requirements, for justification and for diets.
If we adhere to strict definitions, then science and religion have nothing to do with each other. But observationally, the way "science" is perceived and dealt with by a majority of the population is very, very similar to religion.
On this note, there was a funny NPR "thing" a few nights ago. As religions maintained less of a hold over "American life" (by which the commentator and interview meant "those with good college educations", in that pecularly class-centric view that many have) laws and science took over the same role. Religious constraints became secular laws and/or pathologies. My point in this is that often science functions in the same social role as religion--to provide guidance, maintain or create social norms, justify or reward behavior, set up authority figures. Don't eat pork; don't eat trans-fats. The Vatican issues a bull, the NIH issues recommended guidelines--and both are cited as faits accomplis, used in appeals to authority. Simplistic, but there it is.
when the point of this seems to be that it's a typical reaction to stress?
And the University of Amsterdam’s study was about religion or a bad presentation of evolution ("presenting the Theory of Evolution in terms of predictable and orderly processes" . This seems completely unconnected to what he then leaps to - extremist groups like ISIL.
I'm guessing some dolt of a sub-editor is responsible for the awful title. The article is not about 'love of science'.
"Faith is believing what you know ain't so." -- Mark Twain
Science is KNOWING that the laws of nature always work. For example, Christians misuse the word "theory" to mean an "unproven model." I would invite those Christians who don't think theories are often proven, to go walk off the top of a tall building to "prove" that the Theory of Gravity that Newton and Galileo talked about is "just a theory". SPLAT! Thirty-two feet per second squared as the speed of free falling acceleration on the earth, in the air, is "just a theory". SPLAT!!
To paraphrase George Carlin, "I KNOW that the sun comes up every morning so I might as well worship it." That the sun comes up every morning because the earth rotates on its axis once every 24 hours (roughly, we won't get into sidereal time) and the fact that we can calculate precisely where it comes up on the eastern horizon and sets on the western horizon, for every single day of the year, for any point on earth, and that that point moves with the seasons, because of the 23.5 degrees axial tilt of the earth, those are FACTS.
Oh, and it's a real bitch of a calculation, but it can be done. My dear hubby got a book and did it. He has a master's degree in physics and took 40 hours of college math, and he is the one that says it's a real bitch. I'm not a math major.
Why did they put this sentence in? "Deep faith in science is sometimes just another form of (irrational) extremism."
More particularly, why did they put the word "irrational" in and put it in parentheses? Why did they call it extremism?
I won't even get into "evolution was presented as a structured and predictable process." I have a biology degree and they went on and on about evolution because it was so important.
Have we gotten to the point that persons who know that the laws of science work, and have been tested, are called religious extremists? What is the point of that characterization? Is it to make people who rely on facts and not ancient books of myths and stories look bad, because if they are proven right, this challenges the supposed moral superiority of religion? Sort of a variation on, if you don't believe in God, what keeps you from raping and murdering?
For me, anytime I see the word "scientism" in an article, I know that it is going to be written by somebody promoting religion by maligning science. And it never, ever makes any sense whatsoever.
Thanks for your response.
Back atcha! 
well, at least after Mexico, China, India, Africa, Turkey, and the USSR worked to replace religion with science everything came out great for them--why, they even beat us into space!
And that's not always a good thing. It can lead to the creation of new hybrid religions backed and protected by the vast powers of the state (what Noam Chomsky calls the virulent religions of state worship), new religions in which both the old religions as well as science itself will eventually be forced to disavow and distance itself from out of embarrassment, shame and disgust.
Here's just one example of science and religion working hand in hand towards a common goal:
The conversion of the Catholic priest who blessed the atomic bomb crews
A girl prays after releasing a paper lantern Aug. 6, 2012, on the Motoyasu River facing the gutted Atomic Bomb Dome on the 67th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. More than 75,000 people were killed in Hiroshima when the United States dropped the bomb near the end of World War II. (CNS photo/Kyodo, Reuters)
by Tony Magliano | Aug. 3, 2015
Seventy years ago, on Aug. 6, 1945, the single most destructive weapon ever unleashed upon human beings and the environment -- the atomic bomb -- was dropped by an American B-29 bomber on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing approximately 80,000 people instantly.
Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, immediately killing an estimated 40,000 people, with tens of thousands dying later from the bombings because of radiation poisoning.
Blessing the crews and their two missions was Fr. George Zabelka, the Catholic chaplain to the 509th Composite Group -- the atomic bomb group.
In a 1980 interview with theologian, peace advocate and later Catholic priest Charles McCarthy in Sojourners magazine, a Christian social justice and peace publication, Zabelka said during war, the destruction of civilians was always forbidden by the church.
"If a soldier came to me and asked if he could put a bullet through a child's head, I would have told him absolutely not. That would be mortally sinful," he said.
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http://ncronline.org/blogs/making-difference/conversion-catholic-priest-who-blessed-atomic-bomb-crews
