Everything is Religion.

As a person employed to find objective, accurate, predictive answers to questions about the future of the systems I analyze, I like to think of myself as a scientist. That’s what science is, of course – a system or tool or process by which accurate models and predictions of the natural world can be made. As our understanding of nature increases, we can build better tools. With better tools, we can refine our predictions. Some of the tools are physical objects, like pipettes or computers; some are conceptual like calculus and algebra.

But in fact, many many more things are presented as science than actually are. In some cases, it’s pseudoscience designed to misinform, confuse, and exploit. This is especially true in medicine. Things like homeopathy, acupuncture or dry needling, “detoxification” (not relating to actual acute intoxication), and even – to a large degree – supplements and vitamins. For the most part, these things are useless, and can even cause harm, presented as science but really about a spiritual sense of wellness.

But it’s true of things that most people seem to think are real sciences too. Consider political science and economics. We use sciencey words and tools, we perform rigorous experiments in model environments, and we collect data and develop conceptual frameworks. But for the most part, they have no predictive value whatsoever. Studying one economy doesn’t teach us lessons about how another economy will react to similar interventions. We cannot predict elections reliably.

And yet we make predictions and fight, sometimes violently, over their likely effects. We see data points and invent narratives that fit them, making post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacious conclusions. But really, these are religions. Conservatism and liberalism are religious opinions about how the world should work. The same is true of capitalism and socialism. They hold very little predictive value, and are not even coherently defined in a way that allows us to identify them in the real world with rigor.

And finally, science is treated as a religion by scientists themselves in many ways. We scientists, doing real science with real predictive value, want to be seen as priests. We want the public to simply believe what we report, despite not having the access, education, or capability to verify or integrate the concepts and results. We act like ancient mages with access to secret knowledge. We condescend and criticize when the public doesn’t credulously accept what we say.

Most scientists seem to subscribe to the “deficit model”; the idea that if everyone just had more information they’d agree with us. After all, we did the science. But there’s plenty of real scientific evidence that the deficit model is bullshit. People don’t believe just because they see convincing evidence presented by a magister. That’s not how humans work. We believe based on our social systems, our communities, and on things we can personally perceive and witness. This is well-known, and yet scientists reject it because it doesn’t fit their own religious model of dissemination.

Science, real science, is messy. It relies on statistics and repeated observations, and takes time to establish inferences and theories. A single result from a single paper should rarely be taken as a new established fact. We fall in love with our results and we feel personally attacked when they aren’t accepted immediately, even though we criticize others for failing to be objective about their tenuous new findings.

Science itself in not a religion, no; it is a system. But it does have sacred cows, and we all want to be its ministers.