Thursday, July 31, 2008

What's wrong with Science as a Religion?

Salon comes up with a question that reeks of failure.

Anyone that thinks Science can work as a Religion or Religion can work as Science does not understand religion and/or science.

The core to science is verification through experimentation. Nothing, nothing is taken as sacred and unquestionable. That's the whole point. Everything is fair game, but to overturn an existing idea you need to prove it wrong. Science's purpose is to give a flexible framework to observe, model, predict and attempt to understand the natural world.

The core to religion is faith in something that cannot be proven. Religions have principals that are not determined via experiment.

The fallacy of attempting to equate the two should be readily apparent.

People who try to use science as a religion: Radical Environmentalists, and people that try to use religion as a science: Creationists, are cut from the same cloth. They both want use the authority of science to lend a veneer of validity to their agendas.

Rand Simberg has more thoughts.

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