Science Is Not Just Another Religion
From an average individual’s perspective, science is just another religion. They learn about scientific knowledge simply by listening to what the media claims to have been proven by scientists, and absorb knowledge passively without ever getting the chance to challenge the validity of such claims. This is similar to the way religious followers would blindly follow religious texts or words of certain authoritative individuals.
The philosophical underpinnings of the two areas of knowledge differ, however, in two major ways. One critical difference between the two areas of knowledge is in terms of their scope and applications. Religion, as an area of knowledge, is concerned with two types of knowledge claims: positive statements and normative statements. Positive statements refer to statements that lay claim to facts concerning objective reality; whereas normative statements are frequently ethical claims. Religion describes facts which are claimed to be historical (thus making positive statements), and utilizes such facts instrumentally to generate moral standards, that is, normative statements. For instance, the Christian tradition holds true, as a positive statement, that Moses, on Mount Sinai, received the Ten Commandments directly from the source of all power - God. The tradition therefore also considers the ten commandments “objective” moral standards. Science, as a field of knowledge, however, is only concerned with that which can be inferred from natural phenomena. Most scientists recognize the is-ought gap, which states that facts of morality cannot be inferred from facts of natural reality. Science is therefore only concerned with the making of positive statements which describe objective reality, without making any claims to moral standards. Scientists, for instance, may consider it an objective reality that the Earth is currently warming due to anthropological determinants, which would be a positive claim. However, the normative claim that “we should take actions to prevent further global warming” is not a claim that can be tested scientifically. Normative claims simply do not fall into the jurisdiction of science, unlike in the case of religion.
Another perhaps more evident difference between the two areas of knowledge is in their methodologies. Religious beliefs, under most cases, is hardly as malleable as scientific claims. Most religions unite their followers through a single, or a collection of, passages. In Christianity, this would be the Bible; in Islamic religious groups, this would be the Quran. These texts would form the central tenets of the religion. In most religions, the validity of such texts are unquestioned and taken as an objective fact. This does not, however, imply that the area of knowledge is completely static - for the texts may be open to interpretation. There are, for instance, ongoing debates as to whether or not homosexuality is permitted under Christianity due to the multiplicity in the ways to interpret passages in the Bible. In religions, it is merely the case that the authority of the texts is not to be questioned. In the sciences, however, the evolution of knowledge happens at a much quicker pace. This is because there is no one text that has authority over other texts. The only principle that most scientists rely on is the idea that the best hypothesis with the strongest explanatory and predicting power should be adopted. Paradigm shifts, therefore, occur at a higher frequency in sciences than religions (if there are any). Even though publications of certain authoritative scientists might be adopted simply because of the scientist’s authority, it will eventually be eliminated by theories which are better substantiated by empirical results. Such is the case with Newton’s theory of light as particles, even though his theory was widely accepted, it was eventually replaced by the theory of wave-particle duality. H
aving examined how the two areas of knowledge differ in their scope and methodology, it is evident that a necessary prerequisite to the claim that science is not just another religion is that the practitioners of science must have a sufficient understanding of the philosophical groundworks of the subject - so that they can understand why scientific knowledge is likely better at explaining natural phenomena but fails to provide moral rules. If a person blindly reads a scientific textbook containing a list of scientific claims, without reflecting or understanding how scientists have arrived at such claims, and still decides to have complete faith in the text, then science would be no more than just a religion. In fact, it is precisely because of this that certain individuals might think of science as just another religion - most people learn science not through hypothesizing and experimenting, but merely through memorization. They, therefore, care only about what the ideas are and not how we arrived at such ideas. The fact that such a proposition - that both areas of knowledge are the same - has been raised therefore points toward an oversimplification of the nuances present in the two areas, which is symptomatic of the shortcomings of our education system.
