The faith in science

The other day, Z said: I don't share your faith in science.

Faith? In science? Huh??? Doesn't he realize that science is beyond faith? It is purposefully designed to not rely on faith.

Or is it?

Since he said that, I've been thinking a lot about science, undermining my career with every heretical notion. Perhaps science is a religion all of its own. If so, it's a religion of knowledge - of replicable, peer-reviewed knowledge.

Or is it?

Is science just as reliant on belief as religion? Is it perpetuated by followers who don't see other opinions as valid - who dismiss those opinions using esoteric language that is only intelligible to people with advanced degrees? In science only accessible to people who have entered its inner sanctum of knowledge?

Sure, we teach science in elementary school, so it must be easy to grasp. Right. Please raise your hand if you think science is easy. And now, raise your hand if you can describe that tenet at the base of all science, the scientific method. Anyone?

Now raise your hand if you understand statistics. That's the real foundation of scientific reasoning. Sometimes I think it's just a bunch of fancy mathematics. Somewhere, someone thought that 0.05 was a good number. Ever since then, we've been dong fancy math, comparing our results to this and then drawing conclusions about The Way Things Are. We sell these as Facts. And don't you even think about questioning them...

OK OK. So statistics is more complicated than this. But I don't have a degree in mathematics, so I'm just going to have to take my biometry professor's word on faith. I better believe because it seems unlikely that I'm ever going to know.

And how is this different from religion?