• @chiliedogg
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    145 hours ago

    Pedantic rant, but I hate people saying they “believe” in science. Science is not a matter of belief. It’s the realm of the empirical.

    Leave belief to religion and knowledge to science. Mixing the two turns out bad every time.

    • @galanthus
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      41 hour ago

      I quite like that expression. It seems accurate to me, since, as it was pointed out by another commenter replying to you, people do not, in fact, check the experiments themselves, ensure that proper methodology was used, etc. They simply believe what the people in authority positions are telling them, so the word believe is quite accurate - you do not actually know the reasons why certain beliefs, theories are accepted by the scientific community, you just take their word for it.

      Furthermore, any scientist does the same thing to the body research that was developed before him, otherwise, every scientist would have to start over.

    • @nialv7
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      148 minutes ago

      But you do have to believe though. If you are just a brain in a jar, then all your empirical evidences are just illusions. At the very least you have to have faith that that’s not the case.

    • pancakes
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      5 hours ago

      I think people are more talking about believing in scientific institutions to ensure credibility and good faith research. Not necessarily that an individual institution is credible, but more the scientific community as a whole can be relied on.

      Science is absolute, however the way we interpret and understand it isn’t flawless and at the end of the day some level of belief has to be put into the fallible people behind it.

      • @galanthus
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        11 hour ago

        If science, as it is practised is flawed, by your own admission, what do you mean when you say that it is absolute?

        • pancakes
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          130 minutes ago

          The scientific laws that govern how everything functions from subatomic particles, to beehive structure, to gravity are absolute and unchanging. Our understanding of them is flawed and changes over time, but the laws themselves can’t be changed.