Ours is not to reason why
To expand on the point about the difference between checking the world and not checking the world – to repeat –
Science has to check itself against the way the world is, and religion doesn’t. Science is about what is there whether humans can figure it out or not, and religion isn’t. (It claims to be, but it isn’t.)
What you get with an institution that doesn’t require itself to check against the world, is authority. You get the fiat, the Bull, the decree, the encyclical, the Index, the excommunication, the anathema, the charge of blasphemy or apostasy. You get the arbitrary.
Science has to show its work, and religion doesn’t.
This difference certainly doesn’t cash out as the first always making everyone happier and the second never doing so. On the contrary. But it does cash out as accountability in the first case and no accountability in the second. It is the difference between reasons on the one hand and arbitrary authority on the other.
Good science does, of course, but why need the practice of science be good? Theories don’t have to be right to endure, they only have to be convincing. Still, it’s true that that’d still be bad science whereas “good” religion doesn’t have to be verifiable.
I think that was implied in the “has to.” It’s an obligation of science properly conducted. And we can see the obligation being enforced – that was enacted in the response to the NASA-arsenic story, which was part of what made it rather exhilarating for outsiders like me to watch. The system works, as the saying goes. Of course it can also break down, but that doesn’t change the principle.
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W.V. Quine (Two Dogmas Of Empiricism) rather descriptively defines a coherent interpretation as follows:
Thank you.
I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to quote this elsewhere, since it says something I was trying to say, but you’ve done a much better job.
[…] Ours is not to reason why. Concise exposition on the difference between science and religion by Ophelia Benson of Butterflies & Wheels. “Science has to show its work, and religion doesn’t.” […]
[…] Ours is not to reason why. Concise exposition on the difference between science and religion by Ophelia Benson of Butterflies & Wheels. "Science has to show its work, and religion doesn’t." […]