Is Science a Religion?
A few weeks ago I tweeted the following:
Science is religion. There is no objective truth. Even the existence of the atom is disputed. Like religion, science offers us a way of observing the world that can be immensely helpful. But using faith in "science" to crush dissent is no different than using religion to do so.
It was meant to be a thought provoking statement, not an incendiary one. To me it was innocuous, but it must have hit a nerve since it triggered a far greater engagement than most of what I had previously posting. After I declared my intention to run for mayor of Toronto (more on that later), more people read it and had a lot to stay, out of what seemed like more consternation than curiosity.
I stand behind the spirit of my tweet, but recognize from readers’ comments that my wording was an oversimplification. This was due to the medium’s format, and perhaps an overly hasty composition. Had I reflected an extra moment before I hit send (pausing to reflect before tweeting is something I could do a little more!), I would have modified my tweet to read “Science can be a religion”, rather than “is”.
According to Oxford languages, science is:
“the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.”
while religion is:
“the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.”
The prime difference here is that science is not a thing, it’s an activity, while we recognize religion is a belief system. When we go by these definitions, it’s clear that science is not the same thing as religion.
However, when we go beyond these strict definitions, similarities start to emerge. Both science and religion offer us ways of living in this world. Religion offers moral and philosophical guidance, while science offers ways to observe the world around us to gather knowledge and understand it a little more each day. In that vein, science has been around for much longer than the word or concept of science has, since people have been intellectually and practically seeking to understand the physical and natural world through observation and experiment for millenia - just not with test tubes and lab coats.
Where science starts to resemble religion is when we humans start to say things like “I believe in science” as a weapon against others who hold contradictory positions to their own. Or if we say “the science is settled” when such a thing is simply impossible. It also happens when we raise science to that “superhuman controlling power” position, as if “Science” is a pure, objective master, and those who officially practice it as scientists are infallible priests.
In the course of doing my own Bachelor of Science degree (my joint major was biology and environmental studies) I learned that how we practice science is full of errors, bias and even sometimes deception. In one particularly illuminating physics tutorial I learned the fascinating story of the neutrino and the lengths that we will go to prove an idea that, in another parallel to religion, we have faith in something without much evidence.
The practice of science, in all its varieties, is a beautiful thing that helps us build airplanes that fly, develop sewage and water treatment facilities that transformed our cities, and develop everything from antibiotics to Ziploc bags. And the body of knowledge on which we draw to live stagnates if not subject to continual scientific investigation.
We practice science when we investigate and question from a state of pure curiosity as we strive to further our knowledge about the world. We turn the practice into a religion when we rage at, mock or silence those who disagree with us on our reading of the world around us, or when we accuse people of not believing in the science we believe in, as if there is only one science, and we know what it is, not you.
If someone says I don’t believe in science, they are both right and wrong, and it depends on their perspective as they ask the question. If they fear it means I reject all evidence gathered through scientific means, they can rest assured that I do value the activity of science, and feel that the scientific methods we have developed can and do help us immensely. There is science everywhere and we all practice on a daily basis, whether we are baking cookies in our kitchens or creating gravitons at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. But if they are speaking of my philosophical perspective, they are correct. I don’t actually “believe” in anything - even my own existence. I am examining this belief, ironically using evidence gathered through scientists, as I write a book that I hope will challenge everything we think we know about reality.
Ultimately, debate about what science is can never be answered. To paraphrase Neil de Grasse Tyson, science doesn’t care if we believe in it or not. So let’s get on with using it as a method rather than worshiping it as a God.