Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science

Only at the bleeding edge, which you don't need to use in your everyday life. Most science-related things at human scale can be done with your own two hands; you don't require billion-dollar tools to fiddle with materials science, for example. Youtube is filled with videos of people doing human-scale science.

The whole 'science requires faith' argument is largely thrown out to give credence to religion. The problem with that argument is that the fundamental building blocks of science do not require faith, and you build from those. The SI units are convention - you can make your own. What constitutes validity is convention - you can decide your own way. You don't require faith to start doing basic science.

On the other hand, religion's basic building blocks require faith from the outset. Person X is divine, 'trust us'. God Y likes or doesn't like that, 'trust us'. And from these basic religious building blocks, whole edifices are built. For example, most catholics are unaware of how the bible was pieced together by committee. That information doesn't affect their day-to-day lives, however the religious rules that do affect them are based on those fundamental building blocks that are unverifiable by anyone. Faith is required because the foundational blocks are not verifiable at all.

This does not happen in science - you can verify the foundational rules yourself, and build as far along the tree as your interest and tooling allow. Theoretical physics existing in the 'faith' world is largely a canard - most science is not like this, and theoretical physics is at the exploratory edge of science, not at the core foundational blocks. In short, the Planck Length is defined by the meter which we can see and confirm; the meter is not defined by the Planck Length which we theorise about.

Not to mention that in general, 'scientific facts' are constantly tested, and 'religious facts' are not. The engineering capabilities of steel are in constant use in almost every part of our lives; if science was wrong about them, the material would fail in unexpected ways. The divinity of the christ figure... well, it isn't even testable. Christ is only divine to christians, but a steel bridge needs to hold up regardless of the mental state of the humans using it.

I take someone's word for it, but here's the kicker: I don't care. That particular measurement doesn't affect me one jot if it's a different speed. I don't play with optics; the measurement affects nothing I choose to do. However, if I did care, I could work from first principles and find out; it's really well documented, and I can also create my own methodology. This is not true of religious requirements. Throw money in the plate on Sunday because this guy two thousand years ago was divine? There is no way I can verify that.

> Instead of faith, I would have used "trust".

I did leave out a bit saying that the GP was using two different forms of 'faith' that were apples and oranges, but left it out as I was already waffling. :)

However, you will find that as you do your own science, it pretty much always conforms to the rules found by people who have come before you. It's really only as you near the expansion fringes of science that you start getting conflicts with mainstream thought.

Again, this does not happen with religion, where often the argument becomes "god moves in mysterious ways" or "who can know his plan, but he does have one". Core rules that don't make sense with the observed world are often distorted with these phrases. There are definitely grey areas and fuzziness in science - biology has a lot of fuzziness - but there are still common behaviours that work regardless of your cultural background. Born into an Egyptian Coptic family, Christ is divine. Born into the Muslim family next door, Christ is a prophet, but not divine. The fundamental essences of science just don't move with cultural background like that; the resistivity of copper doesn't care about your state of mind.

There is definitely trust involved in science, but trust is a thing that can be broken and reshaped and is allowed to be examined and verified, where faith is not. Besides, if trust is broken, that's considered a fault on the part of the person providing the information. However, if faith is broken, that's considered a fault on the part of the person receiving the information.

But word choice is important - by saying "science relies on faith", the underlying agenda is that other things that rely on faith should be given the same level of trust, even though they don't expose themselves to the same level of inspection.

In my first language I think most people would agree that seeing involves visible light and eyes. We say the blind can't see, because their eyes don't work. We say that we can't see in the dark, because there is not light.

Sometimes we use see in a metaphorical sense, like "the blind see with their fingers". No one would confuse the fact that blind people gather some information about their surroundings with the help of their fingers with the fact that blind people just can't see. It's not the same thing.

I could agree that one can say "seeing" in regard to an atom in a purely metaphorical sense or poetical sense but that was not my interpretation of the original statement.

Maybe in English it's just different?

Of course, if the proponents of astrology choose to present it in a non-falsifiable way, then it is not science from the get-go.

When astrology was conceived, it was actually respectable science, if that concept had existed then, and it led to the development of astronomy. If you can predict the flooding of the Nile by the rising of Sirius, what else might the heavens show you?