chibichibi01 wrote:Why science? Why? This only firms my thoughts that believing in science is like believing in a religion. Someone tells you that these people did something and those other people corroborated the results and it becomes accepted at fact among most people, without preforming the experiments yourself, how can you be sure they aren't lying to you?
Well, that's the difference, really. With religion, you're generally
required to take things on faith (believing, even in the absence of evidence) and authority ("It is written" or "S/he has spoken"). Questioning is often either discouraged or forbidden, and alternative interpretations of recorded events may be condemned as "heresy" (often punishable by death in various messy and painful fashions).
Science suffers from the same limitations and problems as any other field of human understanding... misinterpretation, honest error, fraud and deception, self-interest, faulty evidence or history, etc. However, science is intended to be a continually self-correcting social process... offering alternative explanations, performing new experiments, devising new hypotheses and figuring out how to test them, looking for error or flaw in previously-accepted evidence and interpretations are all
encouraged rather than discouraged, and in fact are essential parts of the scientific process. Taking things as true on the basis of faith or authority is not encouraged, and will tend to result in a scathing peer-review of your paper.
A good scientist is willing to reject his/her favorite theory, or revise it, in the face of new evidence which invalidates it, or when a new hypothesis arises which better explains the evidence or has more predictive power. You will rarely find that attitude among organized religions.
If you can't perform your own experiments... yes, to some extent you're taking things on faith, just as in the case of religion. However, you can always review the findings and papers written by those who did the research, you can study the criticisms of these papers and theories by others, and seek to come to your own conclusions about whether the hypotheses are well-supported and convincing. You can do this within the scope of the specific scientific discipline in question. It's a lot harder to do this within the scope of most religions... I think you end up having to change churches (at least) or faiths (at most) once you "stray" very much at all from the "operating assumptions" of your religious peer group.
If you're looking for Absolute Truth - sorry, science doesn't pretend to understand everything or have the final answer to anything. Religion often does... and you'll find any number of completely incompatible Absolute Truths firmly believed by large groups of people around the world.