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by eis 1385 days ago

  > Tell me, how many scientific "claims" that you rely on a day to day basis, have you verified personally?
Many. Science claims when I push the brakes in my car I will slow down due to the friction. Seems to be working pretty well so far. How does religion explain it?

You fell into the trap of thinking that each person needs to verify each claim in order to put general trust in science. That's not how it works. If I can pick a random claim and given enough time and effort can verify it with a high chance then I can reasonably be sure the other claims are most likely correct. Not all of them! There are scientific claims that are incorrect. We know because they have been shown to be incorrect. But that doesn't invalidate the rest of the claims. And yes there will be claims that I personally can't verify so I'll have to use my own judgement to trust them or not. Over time someone will emerge to prove them wrong if they are indeed wrong. Unless of course they impossible to falsify like the existance of god. But then I just can ignore that claim if it can't be proven either way - no matter if it's a claim in science or religion.

With religion I can't verify much at all. Can I verify the existance of god? Nope. Can I verify earth was created X thousand years ago? Nope. Can I prove that my prayer will get some result? Nope. So logically my trust in the other religous claims is very low.

We had science classes in school. Physics and Chemistry for example. I remember doing experiments all the time to check if something was really working the way it was claimed. It checked out every single time. We also had Religion classes. I don't remember a single time that we tried to verify a claim. Not even an attempt! How do you build faith in a system full of claims with no evidence? As we kids grew older and developed a stronger independent way of thinking instead of blindly believing what the teacher told us, more and more of us started questioning those claims and were left utterly unsatisfied and ultimately left the religion class and switched to ethics instead.

2 comments

>You fell into the trap of thinking that each person needs to verify each claim in order to put general trust in science.

I am not falling into any trap. Science and religion has its legit original purpose (religion was never meant to explain nature, though it does it as part of its own way of accomplishing its goals). But both are prone to exploitation by selfish entities, because of the need or requirement of laymans belief in the ir claims.

So ultimately, a religious claim and a scientific claim that cannot be realistically verified by 99.9 % of people are both similar, and both can end up casuing similar evils.

As I mentioned elsewhere, you cannot prove everything only by science. In Islam, we have logic and the honest news as two other sources we rely on to study and deduce facts about our reality.
Nobody claims science can prove everything! I mentioned multiple times how science is honest about that fact.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem like you addressed any of my points.

I do. My first post here was about scientism, which is the religion that science can explain everything.
No you didn't. The specific thread here of the conversation is not about scientism anymore. But if you want to go back, the original discussion was about science vs religion and not scientism. Nobody in here claimed they adhere to blind faith in science and that science can explain everything. The opposite was stated.
Obviously people have blind faith in what is claimed to be science. The last few years demonstrated it quite well.
Some people have blind faith in scientific claims. That's not science though and it does not invalidate science. A big principle of science is to do exactly the opposite and not blindly trust in something. Every system gets corrupted by some people but it does not mean the system is bad. We're talking about the same thing over and over.