Greta Christina has been writing professionally since 1989, on topics including atheism, sexuality and sex-positivity, LGBT issues, politics, culture, and whatever crosses her mind. She is author of
The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life, of
Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God, of
Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, of
Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and of
Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More, and is editor of
Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients. She has been a public speaker for many years, and many of her talks can be seen on YouTube. Her writing has appeared in multiple magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, Chicago Sun-Times, On Our Backs, and Skeptical Inquirer, and numerous anthologies, including
Everything You Know About God Is Wrong and three volumes of
Best American Erotica. (Any views she expresses in this blog are solely hers, and do not necessarily represent this organizations.) She lives in San Francisco with her wife, Ingrid. You can email her at gretachristina (at) gmail (dot) com, or follow her on
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Science is a belief system though – it is a system whereby we sort the beliefs we have into the bins we label: “Reliable, unreliable and outright BS.”
I would rather phrase it as “Science does not represent beliefs. Science represents a means of measuring our beliefs about the real world, against the real world.”
Outstanding…though I think there have been many cases where scientists nearly equal priests in deceit and chicanery: When they’re marketing their ‘results’ to investors. Cold fusion, anyone? 🙂
It’s not a belief system.
No christian ever said ‘I believe that there is a 90% probability that Jesus died for my sins, given the current weight of evidence, but further work is needed…’
The problem is that the word ‘belief’ has several meanings: you can ‘believe’ in your friend (i.e. trust them), you can ‘believe’ that something is a fact (i.e. think there is strong evidence) or you can believe in something, despite lack of evidence (i.e. have faith) The religious confound these meanings all the time. I prefer to avoid the word altogether.
Science is a system for falsifying beliefs. It can’t ever prove a belief – but it can develop and perform experiments or observations which can falsify a belief. It is the opposite of a belief system.