Belief has nothing to do with science.
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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I think you mean faith. Faith has nothing to do with science.
But belief absolutely does. Science is all about convincing people (scientists) to believe or disbelieve some idea.
One of the first things I learned in bio lab in college is that you never believe anything in science. You accept or reject based on evidence.
Accept or reject, are just different words for believe or disbelieve. The evidence guides your belief.
Maybe to you. Scientific terms often include terms that have other connotations elsewhere, for example, significant or correlation.
Nothing in science is based on belief.
Do you accept that, or believe it? What is the difference scientifically?
Webster definition 3C of Accept "to recognize as true" seems to be what I'm talking about here. Is that different than what you mean?
3C then points to Believe as a synonym. The transitive definition 1B, or intransitive 1A, seems to correlate with what Accept definition 3C means, hence the synonym nature of them. Can you clarify exactly where I'm wrong?
Beliefs are subjective. They can be held without evidence.
Scientific acceptance is the opposite.
I likely won't be able to change your mind because you believe they mean the same thing. I assure you they don't. You can't come to a scientific conclusion based on conviction. You have to accept or reject the null hypothesis based on evidence which even then doesn't necessarily verify your hypothesis. You also have to run everything through statistical analyses to be sure that the results couldn't occur randomly. Everything can change with new evidence and stronger tests (larger sample sizes, double blinds, etc.) Webster's won't teach you that. It records vernacular.
Vernacular is literally what we're talking about. The definition of words.
You seem to be wrapping a number of ideas around the word Believe. Most notably the idea that a belief is fixed. When I say believe, I literally mean only and exactly "Accept as true", or "To hold as true", nothing more. It's literally the 1st definition. And more or less what all the other definitions are wrapped around.
What we hold as true can change at any time, and for a number of reasons. The study of them is called Epistemology. Yes. It's a real branch of science.
It's possible what you're trying to get across, is the idea that science accepts nothing as "true". It can only reject ideas as "false". And the ideas that remain un-rejected as false, are accepted, not as true, but as the best explanation we have so far. In which case I can see your point. However, remember that beliefs aren't fixed. They can also be rejected when new conflicting data is collected. That still sounds like what you mean by accept. Am I wrong?
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You still have to believe the author and the peer reviewers did the correct thing through the process. You have to believe the results presented are real and accurate. Etc, etc.
For example, one of the many scandals of recent times is Franchesca Gino at Harvard publishing false research papers that present false data. People believed it was all real and genuine until a group of people started to do a deep dive into her research.
Yes it does. Most people can't read a case study, and fewer can understand it.
To them, science requires trust in humans and faith that no one is lying.
Most people can't read a case study, and fewer can understand it.
This is the problem.
Eh.. yes and no. I've got an engineering degree, I've learned how to design studies and do science properly, and I still struggle when a study is on topics I'm less familiar with. I can't imagine most people going through these. They're not accessible.
And if you're just reading the abstract and conclusion, or worse a science article, you've got to hope they've interpreted things properly. Which articles are particularly bad at because they need to sound like news.
Or they need a competent journalist to translate the findings without being sensational.
But then they still need to trust the journalist. And considering how much crap science gets published even in supposedly high quality journals, and how little quality peer review happens, even the journalists don't have a scientific basis for much of science reporting.
Part of the problem is the "publish or die" mentality.
Personally, I think the Journal of Negative Results needs more love.
Yes, that's a huge issue. Another issue is that the reward for doing peer reviews is far too low, and publishing negative peer reviews comes with the risk of making an enemy in the same field, who might do your next peer review. So you only call out egregiously bad science or just rubber stamp every peer review, because there's nothing in it for you to publish a negative peer review.
I've read meta studies that said that huge amounts of published scientific studies cannot be reproduced. I can't remember the exact number, but it was >30%.
So if the published science itself is already full of garbage, how is a journalist (who is themselves not a scientist or at least not a scientist in the specific field) know what study is good and what is garbage? And even then, how many people read science journalism compared to boulevard media?
John Bohannon comes to mind, with his purposeful bogus study that claimed that eating chocolate can help with weight loss. He used overfitting and p-hacking to create a study that was purposely garbage and got it published. His goal was to show how easy it is to publish a sensationalist-but-garbage paper. This went so well that every trashy boulevard paper but also many major newspapers ran it, often as a title page news story.
In an interview he said that he got hundreds of calls, all on the level of "Which brand of chocolate helps best?", and only a single serious inquiry doubting his methods.
He published his own debunk shortly after publishing the original story, it it got pretty much no media attention at all.
He basically couldn't even recall his own bogus study, and to this day many people worldwide still believe that chocolate can help with weight loss.
The reproducibility crisis is a huge issue - there's even a whole movement now called "registered reports" where journals accept studies based on methodology before results are known, which helps prevent p-hacking and publication bias that leads to all those unreproducable findings.
Yeah, the problem is that proper science is incredibly hard to do, and incredibly time intensive and thus expensive.
And since only a single metric (amount of published content) is really rewarded, anything else (including the fail-safes necessary for proper science) falls by the wayside.
lol science is fked because you can never be certainn and everything a theory while belief based systems are always certain and always act like theory means false
We might need a science based religion, we could call it Scientology
I'm pretty sure that was the basis of the Foundation series. And I'm here for it
most people need belief and faith in science because they'll never understand it
They don't need belief and faith, they need to trust it. Something that both Republicans and Democrats have eroded because it didn't fit their narrative.
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Europe is very welcoming to any scientists fleeing the regime.
In that case, I'm switching to ghosts, ufos, government cover ups, and the zodiac.
Take that science.
belief has no place in science, thats religion bs.
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