A Scientologist's View of Life

Is science just a matter of faith?

An interesting article on how science can become a faith, as religion often does. From the article:

And therein lies the big problem for science and scientists. For most people, science is really a matter of trusting the expert who tells it to us and believing what they tell us. Trust and belief. Faith. Not understanding. How can we understand science, if we can’t understand the language of science? Feynman said, “Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.” He also said, “To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature.” That’s one of the great popularizers of science telling you that without a strong background in postgraduate horrific math and an active imagination, you’ll never really understand what science has to say about the deep truths of nature the way a scientist does. All we can get is the scientist’s interpretation of what the equations and the theory mean. There is simply no other way to apprehend the concepts. Without the math, you learn science by taking what scientists say on faith. You don’t know that Schroedinger’s equation is a scientific fact, you believe it is.

If we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we accept the incredibly complex scientific phenomena in physics, astronomy, and biology through the process of belief, not through reason. We don’t practice the scientific method. We don’t rationally consider the evidence presented for a theory. We don’t learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing. The same way we learn history. Do you really know what an atom is, or that a Higgs boson is a rather important thing, or did you simply accept they were what someone told you they were?