Originally Posted By: Ellis

In my opinion they are not TOTALLY different, in that neither are proven facts


Then you have to lump them both in the same basket as the claims that the Earth is round, and that there are flying monkeys on the moon. Perhaps what you mean is they're both ideas that some people have about reality. That's such a broad category that it's nearly useless. You might as well rank ideas according to the letter of the alphabet their names start with.

A more useful distinction is whether they comply with scientific principles or not. Which claims are falsifiable? Which ones are the simplest explanation that fits observations? Which ones are based on information that can be verified by others?

This is what makes science different from religion. It's nothing to do with being right or wrong.


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same way, or else that they should! Uncertainty seems to be something that upsets us.

Uncertainty upsets religious people. Scientific people accept that it's inevitable so they don't believe in those things, just tentatively accept their possibility when evidence suggests they exist.


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discoveries are all we have to work with. Our science and our religion, as well as our art and our literature are all

There's still a fundamental difference between science and those other fields.

Science takes information from the outside world and forms an imaginary model of reality to fit that information.

Religion and art take information from their audience's existing ways of thinking and create imaginary realities to fit those ways of thinking.