No, Science is Not Just Another Religion

I want to debunk once and for all this idea that "science is just another religion".  It isn't, for one simple reason: all religions are based on some kind of metaphysical assumptions.  Those assumptions are generally something like the authority of some source of revealed knowledge, typically a holy text.  But it doesn't have to be that.  It can be as simple as assuming that there must be some kind of purpose or meaning to existence, assuming that the question "Why are we here?" or "Why is there something rather than nothing?" actually has a satisfying answer.  There is nothing inherently wrong with making such assumptions, but there is something wrong with trying to deny that you've made them, or assuming that everyone else has made them too.

Science makes no metaphysical assumptions.  I'll often hear people say that science assumes materialism or atheism or some such thing, but that is wrong.  Science is just the process of seeking explanations that account for observations.  It makes no assumptions.  It does not assume materialism.  It does not assume the existence of objective reality.  It does not assume that satisfactory explanations of observations even exist.  It turns out that satisfactory explanations do exist.  We know this because we have actually found them.  And it turns out that these explanations do not require deities or mind-body dualism or divine revelation.  All they require is the right math.

It turns out that with the right math we can account for all phenomena that are observed to occur here on earth.  (I hedge with "here on earth" because we do not yet have complete explanations of some cosmological phenomena.)  At the foundation of modern science is something called the Standard Model, which describes the behavior of all known fundamental particles.  The predictions made by the Standard Model agree with all observations.  Not a single observation of a phenomenon here on earth has ever disagreed with the predictions of the Standard Model.  Indeed, this has precipitated a major crisis in theoretical physics because for the last 50 years since the Standard Model was formulated, particle physicists have had no idea what to do with themselves.

None of relies on any assumptions.  It is all empirically observed fact, which you verify for yourself every time you use a piece of modern technology.  Every time you use a phone or a computer you are doing an experiment that checks the predictions of the Standard Model.

Does this prove that God does not exist, or that there is no afterlife?  No.  Nothing is ever proven in science.  Science does not produce proofs, it produces explanations.  But these explanations have one very important feature: they converge.  Throughout its history, the progress of science has been monotonic.  Even when major revolutions have happened, when radically new explanations have displaced old ones, it turns out that the old explanations were actually reasonable approximations to the new under certain circumstances.

Whatever this thing is that science is empirically observed to be converging towards is called "scientific truth", not because science makes any claim to uncover metaphysical Truth with a capital T, but simply because it's a convenient and intuitively plausible label.  We say that it is true that the earth is round, that it revolves around the sun, that it is made of atoms, despite the fact that it is possible that none of these things are metaphysically True.  Indeed, the Standard Model tells us that the statement "matter is made of atoms" is just an approximation to the truth, just as Newtonian gravity is just an approximation to the truth.

But these approximations have a very important property: they are very good approximations, in the sense that they give us the ability to predict certain future events with vastly greater accuracy than any other method ever devised by man.  Astrology, tarot, reading auras -- none of these even come close to the predictive power of the scientific method.  (Indeed, all of these methods have more or less the same predictive power, which is to say, none at all.)

The fact that naturalistic explanations can account for all phenomena that are observed to occur here on earth, and that they give us the gift of prophecy, is hard-won knowledge, pieced together bit by bit by many thousands of people working over centuries.  This progress was punctuated by major breakthroughs made by people whose names are immortalized in history: Galileo.  Copernicus.  Kepler.  Newton.  Darwin.  Einstein.  But there were countless others who toiled anonymously to bring this Promethean gift of knowledge to mankind.  To dismiss all this hard work as "just another religion", or that "atheism requires faith" is an insult to their hard work.  It is every bit as insulting as saying that Christians worship a zombie.

Science demands no faith.  In fact it is the exact opposite: science demands skepticism.  Science rejects arguments from authority.  Science has no pope, no ecclesiastical hierarchy.  Scientific academia might have such a hierarchy, but scientific academia absolutely should not be conflated with science!  Science is inherently democratic.  Anyone can do it.  This is not to say that doing science is easy.  It isn't.  It requires diligence and hard work.  But it does not require faith.

I was motivated to write this in part because I often hear Christians try to claim credit for the rise of science in Western Europe during the Enlightenment.  As evidence they point to the fact that nearly all of the Big Names in Enlightenment science were Christians.  Which is true.  Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton were all devout Christians.  But virtually everyone in Western Europe was a Christian at that time.  Assigning the credit to Christianity is no more valid than assigning the credit to the fact that they were white men, because they were all that too.

But the history is neither here nor there.  What matters now is what is happening now.  And what is happening right now is that the Catholic Church just elected a pope who once

...lamented that Western news media and popular culture fostered “sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the gospel.” He cited the “homosexual lifestyle” and “alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children.”

That is anti-scientific, not because of the position, but because of the justification: homosexuality is at odds with the Gospel.  That is an argument from authority, which is as violently anti-science as you can get.  So it doesn't matter if the Church was anti-science in the past or not.  What matters is that it is anti-science right now.  And the Church of course is not unique in this.  All religions are inherently anti-science because all religions are based on some metaphysical assumptions.  That is the defining characteristic of a religion.  Science is unique among human intellectual endeavors.  It is the only philosophical foundation that makes no assumptions.  It is nothing more and nothing less than the quest to explain observation.  That turns out to be an extremely powerful lever, which is why, I think, that all other philosophical traditions look on the success of science with envy and try to tear it down.  If your identity or your livelihood revolves around being a person of faith, the success of science can be bad for business.