Ask Lemmy

Science absolutely involves belief, the idea that the scientific method is a divorced concept from belief might fly in a badly written Wikipedia article description but in terms of actual science, belief absolutely factors massively into science. So does intuition.

Science is just a meaningless constellation of data points without any belief to connect them. One has to be very careful and continually retrospective about what those beliefs are, but it is absurd on the face of it to say that science is magically outside belief.

Science isn’t a collection of facts, it is a collection of questions that arise from hypotheses that themselves arise from belief and intuition. Just because that is scary and opens up the door to conversations about how belief always shapes our thoughts and actions even when it is in the context of science doesn’t mean you can just slam the door and demand that somehow science doesn’t include these things.

What differentiates science from other things is the intentional practice of questioning one’s conscious and subconscious beliefs, not the absence of belief.

Authoritarian minded centrists always want to bludgeon people with the idea that science is just a set of facts handed down by authority, but that is a lazy and ultimately fundamentally incorrect way to understand and advocate for science. The mistake we made was letting the word “skeptic” be redefined from a lifelong practice of questioning one’s own beliefs to being what some random person who knows nothing about a subject is when they just decide not to believe in something for no good reason.