Quote Originally Posted by Malum Argenteum View Post
I've heard people claim this pretty often. It has never been true, though, since it is based on a very basic lack of understanding of just what science is.

Science is, at its core, measurement plus logic. Science involves collecting data about physical things, and applying reasoning to figure out what follows from that data. (It is often said that a core element of science is 'repeatability', which is true but that's mostly a re-confirmation of the data, and of the reasoning, to make sure that the results weren't accidental or contingent on some unknown variable.)

But everyone (more correctly, every human person who can operate in the world at at least a very basic level -- so not people in vegetative states, or full-on and complete dementia, but pretty much everyone else) believes in (i.e. uses and depends on, almost every second) logic, usually implicit but very very frequently explicit. Simply saying 'I don't...' is a move in logic (it is a negation). The statement above that I quoted is itself a conditional -- 'if this, then that' -- which is the primary operator of logic (logic itself is something like 'the science of what follows from what'). So, it can't be the logic part that isn't believed in, since that would make the above quote a self-referential paradox.

Everyone believes in (i.e. uses and depends on) measurement, too. Even walking down stairs involves measurement (doing it, and modifying one's behavior based on it), since if the foot goes a certain distance farther forward, there's broken bones in one's future, and everyone avoids broken bones at least much of the time.

But even professional scientists often have a fuzzy grasp of what science is, or at least ignore what science is fairly often. It isn't hard to find claims like 'science says that we should stop emitting so many greenhouse gases' or 'according to science, all that beer is bad for you'. But those are moral imperatives ('should') and evaluations ('bad'). Measurement and logic famously cannot by themselves get us to prescriptive statements (look up 'Hume's is/ought problem' for the history of this).

It seems that what people who think they don't believe in science (which is different than 'not believing in science'; the person whose belief it is does not have preferential access to that belief -- "actions speak louder than words" is the colloquial take on this fact) are opposed to are the ethical claims of scientists, or (similarly) of people who take the findings of science seriously enough that they have natural and expected moral feelings about those findings. But that's not 'not believing in science'; that's a moral dispute, one that if it is to be figured out needs to understand where the dispute actually lies. Because the dispute doesn't lie in science, since everyone who has been alive and functioning for the last ten minutes believes in science.

My minor field of PhD study was the philosophy of science, so I find this stuff all quite interesting.
I have no reason to believe reality is real, or that any measurements are reflective of anything. These measurements are just models, and the model is an abstract concept, rather than something actually tied to physical existence. I often act as if models are accurate, but I do not believe they actually are. Insofar as science defines a model and says "look in this model things are this way," I could be said to believe it. That means nothing though, because I only believe it within the context of its own definitions.

Logic is the same thing. It's true within the context of its own definitions. Most people's model of reality seems to follow basic logical axioms, but I see no reason to believe that has anything to do with what's really going on.