• @chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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    264 months 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@lemmy.world
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      184 months 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.

    • pancakes
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      4 months 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@lemmy.world
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        14 months 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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          04 months 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.

          • @galanthus@lemmy.world
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            24 months ago

            As far as I understand, science is a human endeavour, so I would certainly not say it is absolute, but I see what you mean.

            Although I would say, my position is somewhat different, I do not see any reason to believe that even if these “laws” exist, science has at any level access to them, the “nature of reality”, if you will, “laws of the universe” are metaphysical concepts that can only ever be speculative, scientific laws are not interpretations of them, they are separate constructions.

    • @Dasus@lemmy.world
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      44 months ago

      Knowledge is often defined as “justified true belief.”

      Flat Earthers have the science. The science is justified and true. But they refuse to believe it.

      Philosophy has considered those two pretty intertwined for a rather long time.

      • @Nalivai@lemmy.world
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        04 months ago

        Science isn’t something you can have, it’s a method of getting information. Flat earthers don’t use the method so instead they apply other methods, and those can give them different, empirically wrong results.

        • @Dasus@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Science isn’t something you can have, it’s a method of getting information.

          Oh alright mister pedantic. See sometimes sentences have things like implications in them. Saying someone “has” some arbitrary concept or system, like asking a ship"do you have navigation", doesn’t mean the person asking that thinks of navigation as a singular object.

          They have the science available to them. Ie they have the ability to look at endless amounts of it.

          “They have other methods”

          (How annoying would it be if here I started autistically screeching about how you don’t “have” methods, you use them)

          You completely misunderstood my comment, and are now pretending that one of the most common definitions of “knowledge” is different from what I said; having justified true belief. In something.

          Flat earthers have justified true information available to them, but they REFUSE TO BELIEVE IT.

          It’s caller amathia.

          Here, read this.

          https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/one-crucial-word/

    • @nialv7@lemmy.world
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      34 months 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.

      • @chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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        -14 months ago

        Not knowing the answer to something isn’t a belief problem, it’s an ignorance problem.

        For millenia we were ignorant regarding the relationship between the sun and the earth. That didn’t make cosmology a belief system. We were just wrong.

        Faith is not the source of science.

        • @nialv7@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          You are not getting what I was saying, let me put it this way, how do you know this isn’t just all a dream you will one day wake up from, and find out that the real real world is run by wizards and dragons?