Phil asked:

Is science the new religion?

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Ooh, you've pushed one of my buttons here. The real-world answer, of course, is both yes and no,
depending on how one views science, and religion. But let us take the ideal case.

In religion, one sooner or later comes to something that must be accepted unquestioningly, on faith: a
dogma.

In science, ideally,one may nothave dogmas. There is, for science, nothingin any principle,
methodology, or idea that cannot be investigated as to its validity, applicability, and so forth. Including
that statement. Nothingis sacred, above questioning, including scientific methodology. Nothing.

And that,in a nutshell, is the difference between science and religion. Now I am notsaying that
scientists as individuals and as schools have no dogmas, assumptions, and so forth. But the history
of science is a history of the investigation of those assumptions, their overthrow and replacement by
other principles.

Now, is this a religion? Is the principle that everything, including this principle, can and should be
investigated by any methodology available, and checked and rechecked for accuracy and validity a
religion? Well, if it is, then there is nothing that is nota religion, and the terms "religion" and
"non-religion" become meaningless distinctions, don't they. If science, as this ideal, is a religion, then
that's the end... everythingis a religion.

Contrariwise, one can ask something like, "do too many people have a blind faith that science will
benefit them?" And if thatis making science a religion, then, given the current political and ideological
climates world-wide, my own very personal response would be that we need much moreof that
version of science. The world now seems to me to be in the grip of various religious frenzies; a little
more science would be wonderful at this point, in my very politically-incorrect opinion. To put it more
calmly... science is a tool, and results in tools. Tools can be used for good or for bad; one can use a
plowshare to beat someone else over the head. Science per se is something that must be properly
directed; and by the same token, it will always bothbe used properly andmisused, just as all tools
are, by human beings.

Steven Ravett Brown

When I first read this question my first response was to write down a list of aspects of the situation
that I thought could be the basis for an answer. This list consisted of:

1. Faith and falsifiability

2. Comfort, comforting and comforter

3. Certainty and being certain

4. Explanation and explanatory power

5. Protection and protector

6. Control, controlling and the controlled

7. Defender, protector and weakness

8. Value source

9. Forgiveness source

10. Transforming, life changing and change

10. Belief code

11. Moral code

12. Culture

I thought I would then construct an answer in terms of the interaction of these terms with the key
terms of the key question that I identified as: science, religion new and old. However it occurred to me
that it would be interesting to take another approach in which we assumed that science was the new
religion, in effect asking the question, "supposing science was the new religion?" We can generate a
surprisingly rich field within which we can pursue this question just by considering it in the context of
the categories of change, time or sequence, person and the logical operator, 'not'.

If we add two examples for each category you can begin to see the complexity that is being
generated by the question. For the category of change we can introduce the possibility of 'change for
the better' or 'change for the worse'. We can divide the category of time or sequence into 'now' or
'later' by which I mean we can look at 'now' in the sense of the present and 'later' in the sense of the
future or we can read 'now' in the sense of what is the case and 'later' in the sense of what follows or
what it leads to. Persons, we can consider in terms of 'self' or 'others'.

When we take into account the logical operator of negation taking these terms as its object to
produce terms like, 'not change for the worse' or 'not now' then we can construct a total number of
sixty eight paradigms or thought vehicles within which we can examine the original question.

So the original question has now become a question generator that produces sub questions like,

Given that science is the new religion,

1. Does it bring about change for the better for me, now?

2. Has it made things better and not worse?

3. Will it make things worse for others later?

Within which you can provide examples, evidence, counter examples and argument for each case
and from which you can later look back and search for patterns and generalities that may have
appeared within all your answers.

In a sense my answer has also been a non-answer in that it has offered a technique from which you
can develop and debate your own answers rather than offer you a specific analysis. It has also
offered a general pattern of question generation for developing arguments in the form of the inference
pattern:

Given situation S then Question Q?,

Where Q is a question sentence that contains the constituents:

"[? Assert or Negate ( Category1 or Category2 or Category3)],"

like in the example above.

From which we generate paradigms or pseudo-sentences of the form:

"?C1,C2,C3, or ?NC1,C2,NC3. We could for example go back to my initial approach and let C1 =
Falsifiability, C2 = Faith etc and proceed with the analysis of your question from this starting point."

All of which is saying something in a very complicated way that we say very simply to children when
we teach them to classify biological objects using 'Keys'. This approach may only lead to you from
your initial question to many further questions, and possibly some particular answers, but some might
consider that this is the most that philosophy can achieve.

Neil Buckland