Right! Always Sunny is funny (the bells in that scene get me every time), but, in the name of comedy, it skips over the obvious: you can go to natural history museums! They frequently have talks where you can meet people who have dug dinosaur bones out of the ground, and they love to answer all your questions about it.

Sure, they could all be faking it, but at that point you have to question how much evidence it takes to believe in anything at all.

> Sure, they could all be faking it, but at that point you have to question how much evidence it takes to believe in anything at all.

This is worth questioning (and hopefully coming back around to believing in)! Most of the reason I reject the idea of young earth theory is that the incentive to fake the earth's evident age is so vanishingly low my understanding of the rest of society would also have to be rejected. And that's a deeply stressful act to engage in without my own incentive to. But it's worth knowing about yourself that your view of the world is inherently based in your place and comfort within it, even the stuff that people broadly agree about, not some sense of discovering absolute truth. The latter aspect is just a symptom of having a coherent worldview, which people manage with very heterodox beliefs all the time.

It's worth looking into examination of flat-earthers and why they turn to it—it's often linked to myriad other conspiracy theories, each of which support each other.

> incentive to fake the earth's evident age

Not arguing the specifics here, but a deliberate effort to deceive is not a prerequisite for a widely held theory to be false. It is likely that all of the proponents of luminiferous aether believed they were dutifully following the evidence but they still arrived at the wrong conclusion.

All evidence is theory-laden. Scientific study is still a sociological system despite our best efforts (yes, I've read Kuhn like everybody else)

> if science is conducted properly, it lays out in public the available objective evidence for its truths and invite anyone to come and investigate, and falsify the claims if they have sufficient evidence to the contrary

This is true statement, but it doesn't mean any given piece of knowledge produced by science is actually battle-tested. See the replication crisis.

Yet as soon as a published paper gets an idea from their abstract into The News (TM), that interpretation (potentially misunderstood or embellished by the journo) is "facts" and "science."

"truths of science" ironically betrays a misunderstanding of scientific epistemology.

Science isn't in the business of truths. It's in the business of explanations, predictions, theories, and data. e.g. This theory explains/predicts all of the data so far.

That exactly describes the groping towards 'a more correct model'. Which is towards the truth, surely? If not then what?

Abstractly yes, the scientific process should eventually produce theories which never again need to be updated, and perfectly predict all future data. Science doesn't have a way to know when it has finally stumbled upon such a permanent theory though. Science isn't in the business of certifying its theories as true, just discarding them as false.

There are truths involved in science, but they are just mathematical/logical truths. Data is taken to be axiomatic, and logically true statements can be derived from the data. e.g. "95% of the values fall in this range", "no value is greater than 50". Those are just logical statements about sets, and they couldn't be used to prove any theory true, although they could prove one false.

> Science doesn't have a way to know when it has finally stumbled upon such a permanent theory though.

It doesn't need to and I didn't claim it was trying to (especially as it's impossible as you correctly point out). But the closer the model is to reality, the more useful the model is, and therefore the closer it is to being true.

> Science isn't in the business of certifying its theories as true, just discarding them as false.

Given the immensely complex and sophisticated and successful human achievements that depend on these models, such as spaceflight, computers, GPS, any number of things. I think you're doing the baby/bathwater thing. The models work very well so they must be very close approximations to what the universe does. So they approach 'the truth'.

I think we may have to agree to disagree. It may be you see as a binary thing – it is or it isn't. I see it as graduated.

> > believing in the truths of science is unavoidably an act of faith.

The purpose of science isn't to establish truth, it is to find the mostly likely hypotheses to explain natural phenomena (or the hypotheses most unlikely to be false).

I think that is the real difference between a religious statement and a scientific explanation: the former is a statement about truth, the latter a hypothesis that could be refined based on further evidence.

I feel the greatest difference is that in science, you are to assume the negative. You are to prove yourself wrong, not right. Being right is a matter of accomplishment by exclusion. It is the pursuit of facts/truth, but with the understanding that you are cutting away the incorrect or irrelevant to leave a predictive remnant, not starting with an answer.

> For the majority of people.

science is not generally understood as a source of constant critical inquiry, but rather a source of unquestionable belief.

When asked if the Earth goes around the sun, most people would confidently reply, "Yes, it does."

However, when asked if they have any doubts, they would unlikely admit to any uncertainty. It suggests to me that most people have faith in what science says. Rarely questioning or ever challenging it.

The few who disagree with the scientific consensus are not necessarily more scientific, but at least remain skeptical which paradoxally may make them more scientific than those who just take it for granted. Whether the skeptic have well articulated reasons for their doubts or not, they are often met with resistance or even ridicule.

In my opinion, scientific claims have become as problematic than religious beliefs. If one questions or challenges what is published in a scientific journal today, they may be seen as heretical. The recent pandemic has shown how science can be used to impose a dogma, much like religion.

Reminds me of one of Norm Macdonald's bits where he would confound an interviewer by saying (and I'm paraphrasing) "I would not convict a rapist based on DNA evidence" and go on to explain how he didn't understand the science behind it so how in good conscience could he act on basically "taking the word of some guy in a white lab coat."

I fly on airplanes and drive in cars and work in a skyscraper even though I cannot explain Bernoulli's principle or exothermic redox chemical reactions, or the chemistry of concrete hydration and curing.

Even though I don't understand any of the science very well, I know enough not to attribute these mysteries to magic or gods.

The issue comes down to reproducibility and understanding of the problem space.

A chimeral person with two different DNAs in their body isn't magical, but it can throw off any rule base system that says "People only have one DNA in their bodies". The first chimeral person that showed up was a type of black swan event showing us that we did not understand the problem space as well as we thought.

Not sure if this is what you meant, but Norm's conclusion,

> how in good conscience could he act on basically "taking the word of some guy in a white lab coat."

is actually quite correct. There is science behind DNA evidence, but there is also frequent malpractice of lab technicians, which ends up muddling results, with life ruining consequences.

John Oliver has talked about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScmJvmzDcG0

If you want to know more, BobbyBroccoli has an entire channel full of extremely gripping videos about scientific malpractice and how it gets caught: https://www.youtube.com/@BobbyBroccoli/videos

> The intro did strike me as pretty questionable though:

> > For the great majority of people, believing in the truths of science is unavoidably an act of faith.

I largely agree with the statement you quote.

I have a PhD in physics; I understand science well. I believe that man went to the moon. I understand one of the proofs - they left a reflector which you can aim at with a laser.

But.... I've never pointed at laser at it myself. I would probably struggle to obtain such a laser and would definitely struggle to aim it and detect the reflection (by reading up on engineering I probably could do it if I dedicated to it very significant effort). So, on what basis do I hold this belief?

The truthful answer is that I believe I'm good at evaluating other more indirect sources of information. For example, if a scientist claims that they have such a laser and made the measurement, I believe I am knowledgeable enough to read their publication and spot a large class of inconsistencies that could expose their frauds. But.... I haven't even done that. And this is me, who (probably) has the intellectual tools to explore these questions. Imagine someone who doesn't even understand the scientific process.

EDIT: I'm now reading the article and I see that they've made the same points already much better.

"We went to the moon" is a historical claim, not a scientific one. Correspondingly, my belief in it is similar to my belief in the rest of history: it seems like the more difficult lie. Getting everyone involved in faking the moon landing to lie sounds like paying off thousands of tourists to claim they saw an ancient city on a mountain in Peru: impractical.

One thing I did realize, though, the first time I got to play with a Geiger counter, was that this was probably the first time I had actually observed the inverse-square law, after nearly two decades of schooling on the matter.

> I probably could do it if I dedicated to it very significant effort

That's entirely my point. You know that you could investigate these facts to their full extent, if you really wanted to. That does not hold for the "faith" that religion talks about.

I believe that I could, but I never did. So I have faith that the people who say they did are telling the truth. Best I've actually done is evaluate their credibility.

But the fact that you could is extremely important. There is a set of steps you or anyone can take should you wish to convince yourself. This, in my opinion, makes it fundamentally distinct from religious faith.

> Only a very small percentage of the world has a complete grasp on the evidence for natural selection, climate change, the big bang, etc...

I'm guessing only a small number (1-2 digits of people) has a "complete grasp" on the evidence for any one of those topics at all, and there isn't a single human on earth with a "complete grasp" on all of them. To support the article, integrating knowledge of fields that you don't have "complete grasp" on still requires faith in institutional processes that produce what we call "science".

And this is even more complicated when it comes to the replication crisis—I'm guessing having a "complete grasp" on the understanding the literature represents of difficult to reproduce fields is 0. I don't know much about climate change work myself, but it seems like such a dynamic and chaotic field that many results on specific claims of cause and impact are going to be difficult to reproduce.

People will gladly accept bad proofs if it furthers their beliefs or identify politics. They will also argue wrongfully against correct proofs. And they will influence others.

I assume that's the point of the article; people who are not educated to identify nonsense will accept nonsense or decide to trust nothing.

This is obviously very ham-fisted, but I believe that's the idea.

This brings to mind the saying "Anything is possible when you don't know what you're talking about."

It really comes down to one side saying “Trust me” and the other saying “Don’t believe me? Try it yourself”.

Even this one isn’t clear. Do you mean “trust me” as in “trust the science” and “try it yourself” as in “trust Jesus and see for yourself”. Or “trust me” as in the Catholic Church “don’t read the Bible I’ll tell you what it says” and “try it yourself” as in “verify my results”.

Exactly. Now you know why we’ve been arguing over it for a millennia.

To be completely transparent. I was referring to religion “Trust me” and science “Don’t believe me, try it yourself”.

Because humans have bias, and depending on what side of the fence they are on, they will read it how they want to read it.

One could make an argument for both.

The statement is true though. One is about loyalty and faith through blind trust, and the other is faith through trust that they followed the scientific method. Both have “published papers”. Both have some sort of verified results. Only one is real science of hypothesis, experiment, observation, conclusion. If it fails that test, it’s lumped in with Scientology.

Also, the parts of science that affect our everyday lives come together to form a coherent picture which explains many different observations. Religions don't have anything like that.

Faith is used in two ways here. One is trust in the scientific method and the other is in a personal relationship to the finitude of being and the impossibility to collect all evidence beyond experience or human comprehension.

Doctors still proscribe opioids and cocaine, the difference is mostly things like how shelf stable the compounds are not what they do or how addictive they are. Hellenistic astronomers got a roughly accurate calculation for the size of the earth in 3rd century BC, it’s spherical nature was deduced much earlier. Flat earth didn’t become popular due to scientific investigation but a complete lack of it, just as people on the internet still promote it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes

Christianity has multiple times completely changed how they viewed Jesus let alone less foundational aspects of the faith. Read up on the First Council of Nicaea and similar such events, or ask the Vatican how old the earth is.

> let alone less foundational aspects of the faith.

God himself seems to have changed around the time of Jesus, with a really elaborate justification to make sense of it, based on very little that's actually in the Bible:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Covenant

Cocaine is not an opioid. That's morphine, heroin, codeine, and fentanyl and others.

Yes, swapped ‘like’ for ‘and’ as I realized it wasn’t clear what I meant.

I meant Numbrino (Cocaine hydrochloride) which was approved in 2020 is used in place of Cocaine the same way Hydromorphone etc is used in pace of Morphine. Cocaine is a useful topical numbing agent, but tweaking it slightly is beneficial.

> A big difference I think is that religious truths by and large don't really change.

Current religious beliefs of religious groups change all the time; its a common conceit that the underlying truth is eternal, and sone groups also work hard to rationalize the changes as not really being changes if you squint just right because they have beliefs about the immutability of doctrine that are confounded by them changing their doctrines, but...

While science does indeed lay out the "available objective evidence", it is highly unlikely that a layman would understand them.

> I could understand the basis for climate change if I took enough time out of work and family and did my research.

> With religious truths, on the other hand, investigations reach a dead end with "this is simply a matter of faith" or "you just have to feel this to believe it".

No religion worth its salt would ever present a proposition, point blank (e.g., the divinity of Christ[2]) and then claim you are required to believe it just because, or because "feelings". That is merely a caricature, a straw man, and if that were the case, then you could easily ask why this particular belief? Why not what the guys down the street are selling? New Age is big on feelings, a grand synthesis (read: hodge-podge) of superstition, so why not them? Why not the various kooky ideologies springing up in our times, nearly all of which follow the same gnosticizing script, with the added aggression and bullying they deploy when demanding you believe their claims simply because they make them. Certainly, there are some traditionally religious people who say the kinds of things you say about faith, today perhaps especially in the US, but it is neither wise nor charitable to judge a faith by the flaws of its weakest professors. And not only that, but not all faiths are the same. Not all faiths are actually faith, that is, rational faith.

Now, because faith is a kind of trust, a kind of uncertainty does enter the picture. But legitimate trust is not irrational, and so genuine faith is not irrational, and indeed, all men have faith; your distinction is not as profound as you may think, though certainly there are distinctions to be made and a certain diversity of methods ought to be considered (historical vs. empirical, for instance). Methodology is an important thing to bear in mind, specifically when recognizing, that rationality and modern, empirical science are not identical. This is the error of scientism, one easily refuted by the observation, that the claim that equates the two is not itself a scientific claim.

John Newman[0], for example talks about how the aforementioned assent can take place, and here is an article[1] that gives a brief summary. But a look at, say, the robust tradition of Catholic apologetic scholarship will certainly show, that this faith not only respects reason, but in doing so, proceeds from it. It goes where reason leads and takes off where human rationality is too feeble or circumstantially constrained to continue. There must be warrant, and reason and authentic faith cannot contradict. So here, too, you could, in principle, also do you own apologetic and theological and philosophical research and come to certain conclusions, just as you could, in principle, if not in practice, do your own empirical or historical research or whatever.

[0] https://www.newmanreader.org/works/grammar/index.html

[1] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05752c.htm

[2] https://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/christ-divinity.htm

I guess my point is that faith necessarily involves a step that cannot be made by observation, deduction, or probabilistic reasoning. You can call this step "trust" if you like, but it seems disingenuous to compare it with mundane trust, such as trusting that your taxi driver has a driver's license, or trusting that the sun is a certain distance from the earth (as per your second link). These mundane trusts can in principle be verified, or at least are falsifiable. I know that I can ring up the taxi company and ask them to send me a copy of the license, and cross-check it with government records. I know that I can perform my own observations and reasoning to convince myself of the distance of the sun from the earth. I do not know that I can do this for claims such as "Jesus is the son of God".

I got around to looking at your final link re "Divinity of Christ". Is this author (or indeed CS Lewis) what you would refer to as one of the stronger professors of Christianity? Lewis's trilemma argument is one of the starkest examples of Christian apologists' failure to perform disinterested reasoning.

Firstly, "liar, lord or lunatic" are not the only options. William Lane Craig suggests several plausible alternatives such as "Jesus was deluded with respect to the specific issue of his own divinity while his faculties of moral reasoning remained intact".

Secondly, Jesus never claimed to be divine in the first place. The earlier gospels and the writings of Paul do not mention it. It's not until decades later that the Gospel of John talks about it.

Thirdly, even if those were the options and Jesus did claim to be divine, the evidence for "lord" is lacking. Especially considering the rule that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Human culture is rife with examples of narcissists, psychopaths and tricksters who convinced large numbers of people of their wisdom, compassion and intelligence. Some of them get "found out", some do not. Jesus may be one of the latter. Reading the gospels hasn't convinced me otherwise. Ironically, Peter Kreefts argues exactly by appealing to feelings: "The savviness, the canniness, the human wisdom, the attractiveness of Jesus emerge from the Gospels with unavoidable force to any but the most hardened and prejudiced reader."