Religious Worship Different From Mere Admiration

As I talk to religious believers of various theological bends, I often hear them counter my criticism of their beliefs by informing me that I worship science. While I admit that I am quite fond of the scientific method because it allows us to better understand the world and makes our lives so much easier and more fulfilling, I wouldn’t go as far as saying that I “worship” science.

It occurred to me that perhaps I didn’t understand the meaning of the term. So I looked it up in the dictionary to give me a better idea of how it is used. The first definition I found specifically referred to deities. So by that definition one simply cannot worship science unless “Science” lives on Mount Olympus or Heaven.

The second definition is more secular. That definition states that worship is an “ardent devotion.” It doesn’t specify a specific object of that devotion. So theoretically, one could have an ardent devotion to science if one were a scientist. But if we use the term in this manner, it would be akin to saying that someone worships whatever their occupation might be. We could talk about Librarians worshipping books or mechanics worshipping cars. Sure we do sometimes use the term in this manner, but when we do it is with a less serious attitude.

When we talk about a repair person’s worship of their tools, we are not using the term in the same way we do when we talk about a religious believer’s worship of their deity. That is a different kind of worship. I don’t think there is any object of devotion that I can honestly say I worship in a comparable manner to that of the religious to their deity of choice.

I don’t really think much of ardent devotion in that sense of the phrase. Even science from that secularized definition of the term would at best be an ardent devotion to a process and not to a set of beliefs necessarily.

That is the real difference here; science is a method for learning about the world. We have strong reason to believe in the accuracy of our scientific conclusions by observing how well those scientific theories pan out in reality. Some scientific theories hold more weight than others depending on the strength of the evidence and the accuracy of the model to reality. Religion on the other hand is pretty much just ardent devotion to blind beliefs which must be held on faith alone. That’s a worship I just can’t abide.

How do you question a belief that doesn’t stand on evidence? Providing evidence to disprove the belief doesn’t work because the believer doesn’t rely on evidence for the belief… or as Hitchens put it, “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” Why would anyone worship something without evidence?