it is possible to both accept the science and doubt it at the same time
Silly me, I kinda thought it was impossible to accept science -or to pursue scientific methodology -
without doubting everything all along the way and tirelessly imagining every way a conclusion could be wrong.
Do these people ever do the same thing for their religious or spiritual beliefs? Nope. It is always only *science* that must be doubted.
A well-reasoning person would not cite and interpret the statement, "it is possible to both accept the science and doubt it at the same time", as suggesting that "only *science* ... must be doubted".
I'm not interpreting the statement as that. It's simply that people who usually say that about science, while not mentioning anything about doubting religion or spirituality whatsoever, do not apply the same doubt to religion or spirituality.
Uh, did you even bother yourself with noting the context in which the statement was made? Religion, spirituality, and whatnot were wholly irrelevant to the matter at issue. Oh, and by the way, plenty of religious people and spiritual people have doubts about their beliefs while also holding those beliefs. But I expect you are actually aware of that.
Wholly irrelevant? Ethics and human consciousness are not irrelevant to one another and you have recently made the argument that secular ethics isn't incompatible with "godliness". Whatever that means.
Well they kind of are irrelevant, in the same way as the basics of how a processor works is kind of irrelevant to working in software engineering among predefined tasks.
Sure, it matters in some deep abstract sense, but you can actually learn the basics of ethics without having to figure out all the stuff to the "crunchy bits".
The key point is to accept first and foremost that most of most people's intuitions are mostly true about most things, but that we don't know what part is actually right and which part isn't.
The issue here I see is that religious people have been taught all sorts of faulty things about doubt, firstly not to doubt their religion, and secondly that doubt is applied by attacking the authority of the people saying it rather than applying critical analysis skills to the contents of their statements.
It essentially boils down to finding the person who can say things that make them feel good in the fanciest language possible.
Because correct explanations of things tend to be much more complicated than the simplistic ones offered by religion, often those interested in appearing correct will hide their incorrectness in a dizzying array of bullshit that they reverse engineered circularly around their conclusion, like the building of a maze so big you do not notice when you have looped about on yourself.
If this is bigger than the ability of the reasonable person to spot, or to spot the common structure of such thought mazes, then they are liable to fall into the appearance of confidence that the snake oil seller wears.
There is a solution that has been discovered for this problem. It involves placing the burden of proof upon the claimant, applying logic to claims, requiring a record of repeatable experiments to bear out process claims, and so on.
There is a well piled process for doubt among serious people which utterly shreds many religious claims as lacking suitable foundation, mostly centered around the authority of their claimants, criticism of doubt, many of their sanitary, dietary, and lifestyle practices maintained by the church largely outside the source material.
The doubt applied within the church, as a result, is this duplicitous and hypocritical sort because the church literally could not survive it otherwise.
In fact I vaguely remember saying this before, shortly after someone else said this, some years ago
www.biblegateway.com
