Maybe nit-picking but the article started out problematic for me with their placement of "maybe?" after the scientific method in their definitions. Without the scientific method as the basis, science is meaningless. Both the ways they define the "idealized concept" are 100% applicable to religions and other lines of thought. It is the methodology of science that differentiates science from all the other ways of doing those things.
100% I wish more people paid attention to the _methodology_. A lot of people define science as the search for "truth", where it really it is the methodology that makes it the key differentiator from religion. The process of hypothesizing then subjecting a theory to rigorous, rational, evidence-based scrutiny is THE key differentiator.
Also the fact that a theory is refutable. That a theory is not _the_ truth, but the best explanation so far and if something proves it completely or partially wrong then we move on to the new, better theory.
Yes, methodology is important, but it’s unclear that the way scientists really work has much to do with the naive description of the scientific method that’s taught in school.
It's not the methodology in and of itself. The key factor that makes science science and not just an arbitrary belief is falsifiability. No matter how you come up with an idea, if it's falsifiable then it is worth pondering because if it's wrong then it can be proven wrong.
It's only when we enter into the domain of unfalsifiable things that we enter more into systems of belief than systems that can challenged or tested. So for instance most of social science is not scientific, because the concepts are generally entirely unfalsifiable. The "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology" is one of the leading journals in its domain - and also one of the most frequently cited by the media due to its oft catchy headlines. It's also one of the best examples of the replication crisis where only about 20% of papers published in that journal are able to be replicated.
Does that mean that 80% of the papers in it are thus fake and false? Nope. Because the entire domain is just completely unfalsifiable, so the complete inability to replicate the overwhelming majority of what that journal claims has done little to change its premier place in social psychology. It's just entertainment with some standard deviations attached.
So looping back to religion, the issue isn't the methodology. It's the lack of falsifiability. You simply cannot disprove the concept of e.g. a spirit because it's inherently immeasurable, untestable, and unknowable. Yet the lack of falsifiability does not mean false. For instance the exact same is true of consciousness. If I claim you're a philosophical zombie [1], you can't prove I'm wrong (or right), because the entire notion of consciousness is unfalsifiable.
> the concept of e.g. a spirit because it's inherently immeasurable, untestable, and unknowable
Do you mean by artifical means or sensing machines or something?
Because spirits are a metaphysical but very human concept, and I answer that they can be perceived, discerned, described, and known [perhaps not fully or objectively].
Faith and reason are both in operation for science and religion. There is a complex history of falsified doctrines, miracles, apparitions, and communities for mainstream Christianity, as I am sure all others.
You can't dissect a Eucharistic host or throw it into a Mass Spectrometer and find Jesus molecules, [unless you're Carlo Acutis] but if one billion people can tell the difference, who are we to judge?
It's better known than Prozac, and possibly more effective, what do you think?
Falsifiability is exclusively about objectivity and measurability. For instance I think it's fairly safe to say that every single human of working faculties would claim they are conscious. This doesn't mean humans are conscious, because it can't be falsified. Our philosophical zombie, for instance, would say exactly the same no doubt.
And no idea if the reference to Prozac was random, but yeah that is a good example. It's effect is not falsifiable at all. It's based on self reporting. And controlled studies, particularly those not carried out by parties with a vested interest in the outcome, shows its effect be scarcely better than placebo. Some might cling onto to that with 'well that does mean it's still better!' yet Prozac has extreme, and rather rapid onset, side effects which makes it basically impossible to not know if you're getting the right thing. This completely ruins double blinds, and could largely explain what little effect it does show.
