I mean, who does understand science? It’s incredibly complex.

Still makes more sense than “God did it”, however.

I think there’s a big difference between knowing that answers exist and with time, energy and resources you could learn them, but it’s just too impractical to do it all, and blindly accepting that no one has the capacity to know something.

Plus, science backs up claims with evidence, experiments and data, and, at least to some capacity, a layman can parse that information. Fundamentally, science is provable, even if you won’t get 100% of it. Religion is strictly founded in the fact that no one is capable of parsing anything it teaches.

Nope. The only thing that would make you religious is belief in a god, or some form of supernatural order governing the universe and, generally, superseding all phenomena described by science.

More to the point, I’ll bet there is SOME science you understand. You understand that if you hold out a ball in your hand and then open your hand, the ball falls. You might not even know this is called “gravity” (although you probably do), but you still understand scientifically that A follows B. Science is just a theory (predictive framework: the knowledge that the ball will fall when you open your hand) tied to observation (you’ve dropped lots of things before, and saw what happened).

And here’s the thing: even if you were the world’s foremost expert on the science of gravity, there will still be vast swaths of established science that you don’t understand. Probably most of it! You would understand a lot of things related to gravity, and a smaller number of things related to physics and/or astrophysics, you would probably understand a lot of the math; but the further you get away from your speciality of gravity, the fuzzier things are for you. Nobody understands it all, there’s too much. So in that sense, when you say “I don’t understand science”, I think you really mean “I don’t specialize in any particular kind of science because my existence doesn’t require it, so there’s a lot of it that doesn’t make sense to me.” And you share the former property with most people on earth, and the latter property with literally everyone on earth. Not all of whom are religious.

I think its important for all people to understand a few important fundimentals of science and its grounding in physical reality. But there’s only so much time in the day and unless you have a real interest or profession in science its reasonable to just accept conventional answers. Its not the same thing as hard blind faith that religions sometimes ask for. Its taking an academic experts opinion at face value.

Its also important to understand that there are limits to provability/falsifiability which science relies on. or put more simply, not all things that are true can be proveable. There’s some aspects of to the human experience, and reality as a whole, that science will forever reject out due to its need for hard falsifyable truths within a working model. Science isn’t an answer to everything, just the hows and sometimes if were really lucky why’s of physical aspects to reality.

Let’s be more exact. There’s the scientific process and then there’s the result of science.

The scientific process encourages further study and research. It’s based upon facts. Our view of the world changes with more discoveries. That’s what you believe in, right?

The result of science is immense. You might study one part but have no exposure/interest in another part. Because you accept the scientific process, you can accept the results in other areas without it being a religion.

Contrast that with religion: it doesn’t tolerate questions because it has no factual answers. The process is to just blindly accept whatever the holy person/scripture says. We can see around us now how well that is going.

There hasn’t been a single person in human history who understood everything.

All of science is a collaboration, where individuals specialise in fields, biology, physics, archeology, psychology, chemistry, etc.

The fields interact, proven things from one helping prove things from another. Scientists may occasionally re-confirm previously proven things, re-investigation consensus…

But no one person alone has ever run the gauntlet of putting reality through the scientific method, going from basic observation, all the way to advanced proofs out to the frontiers of what is known about all things.

Chemists don’t need to start at proving that atoms and molecules exist, they can simply hit the ground running believing something that was confirmed by past scientists.

If at some point the proven assumptions fail to predict reality, only then is there a need to re-examine what was made known by those who came before.

That you accept science, but do not understand it, is merely to stand at the starting point at which all science today is advanced from. You are not a scientist, you do not need to continue walking forwards from that line, nor examine the paths of generations past that took you there.

But regardless of your understanding, scientific consensus can show you where the line is right now, and you have a right to stand on it same as anyone else.

According to this weird philosophy these days where anything qualifies as religion, yeah?

According to common sense no of course not

i dont think intelligence is necessarily what you know.. its what/who you choose as your 'information proxy'. as we all cannot know everything, we purposefully or sometimes not, choose an information proxy for a specific domain of information.

i would say only religious folks would choose other religious folks/religions as their information source..

choose wisely

In the case of science, the claims made are disprovable, but have not been despite many attempts. For example, if you want to see if light is a wave, you can do the double slit experiment with a laser pointer, a piece of wire, and some black tape: Tape the wire over the output in the center of the beam, and then use more tape strips parallel to the wire to create 2 narrow slits. Then shine the laser with the tape and wire on a wall a few meters away. Assuming light is composed of waves, you will an interference pattern consisting of a line dots instead a single dot or line. (Try it!) The same will happen for all forms of electromagnetic radiation, including radio waves, infrared, UV, and even X-rays. Even if you personally have not done many experiments, millions of other people have, verifying that the theories hold over almost any conceivable situation.

The claims made by religion are, if anything more believable, but impossible to disprove and therefor, no one has been been able to try. There is no experiment or observation for the existence of a god, or a soul.

There is a big difference between believing in empirically demonstrated facts and something that no one is able to check.

I certainly don’t have an understanding of how many aspects of science works but I trust it. I trust all the science that goes into making my car operate safely. I trust the science that makes my smartphone and the internet work. I trust the medical science that cures my dad of cancer and healed my brother after a bad accident. I trust all the science involved in providing safe food and water for many millions of people.

I’m also an atheist.

You don’t believe science. Science is the process of understanding and learning the universe. There is nothing to believe. If you agree you agree, if you disagree you prove otherwise. No dogmatism, rituals, beliefs are present unlike religions. So apples to oranges.

You can also choose to understand science if you invest enough time. You cannot, for example, see a god if you work hard. Again, apples to oranges.

Why does it matter to you, if that makes you religious? The understanding of “religious” from the point of view of an atheist is different than from a theist to begin with.

Believing in things we don’t understand is the normal human behavior. Everyone, including Carl Sagan, must believe in things they doesn’t understand, to live their life. That in itself is not a problem.

The differentiation between problematic and live-your-life belief is how you react when you understand a misunderstanding of a previous belief. Will you change your belief, or do you dogmatically stick to it?

Well, you have your hypothesis, now you just need to try and create some tests to attempt to support or disprove it!

Don’t forget to write down your method and results, perhaps other people will be able to try and replicate your experiments.

So let me get this straight, Mr. Dope… You get your information from a book written by men you’ve never met, and you take their words as truth, based on a willingness to believe, a desire to accept, a leap of… of, dare I say it?

Faith?

You’re falling prey to a common trope from religionists: an ambiguous usage of the word/concept “belief.”

I trust what experts in fields outside those I’m deeply familiar with because generally speaking people like them have gone to the trouble of demonstrating what they claim is actually true in the past. That makes it rational, in my opinion, to trust claims that they make today and in the future within their field of expertise.

So to some extent I get the religious commitment of people who have directly experienced what they consider to be miracles. It’s rational, in a way, to become religious after experiencing what you consider to be a miracle.

The vast majority of religious people have not directly experienced a miracle the way I’ve directly performed scientific experiments that validate others’ reported results. They’ve heard about miracles. They’ve read about miracles. That’s not the same, and I’d argue it makes their religious beliefs irrational.

Now, what would probably happen if people were only religious after directly experiencing miracles? I bet religions would just fade away and eventually people who experienced “miracles” would instead contemplate then as unexplained phenomena that could probably have AB explanation rooted in the physical world, and also but become religious.

In a world where religion is encouraged and celebrated, of course people who experience what they consider to be a miracle will first turn to a religious explanation. But if we imagine no religion…