I believe that the age of religion has passed and the age of reason has arrived. I trust visible data and laws instead of the invisible providence of a god. However, when I wedge myself into the cracks of this massive certainty, I find the most stubborn and sophisticated faith residing there: the religion named “Science.”
Repeatability: The Unprovable First Dogma
The core of science is “repeatability”—the belief that an experiment that succeeded yesterday will succeed today and tomorrow. But let me ask dispassionately: where is the evidence that past repetition guarantees future reproduction?
Surprisingly, science cannot answer this. My conviction that “laws will repeat tomorrow” is not a logical consequence, but rather a “dogma” I have chosen to believe. I claim the objectivity of science by speaking of probabilities, but those probabilities are merely numbers that cannot exist without the prerequisite belief that “past frequency will remain valid in the future.” Ultimately, the starting line of scientific thought is not reason, but the realm of “faith,” where one accepts the unprovable as truth.
Scientists as Priests, Papers as Scripture
For modern individuals, science has inherited the religious authority held by the ancients. I do not personally calculate the complex equations of cosmology or quantum mechanics. I simply believe the fact that a priestly group called “scientists” in white coats has verified them, and I accept the figures recorded in the scriptures of academic journals as truth.
If the gravitational constant were to change tomorrow morning and the Earth were to disintegrate, would I call it a scientific error, or a change of heart by the god (the law) I believed in? Science pretends to humbly accept that laws built over millennia could be overturned overnight, but in reality, I survive the day by “blindly believing” that such a thing will never happen. This profound sense of relief is the true metaphysical essence of science.
A Gamble of ‘Utility’ Rather Than Truth
Is science, then, merely a sophisticated superstition? Here, science adopts a clever survival strategy that differs from traditional religion. Instead of claiming to be the “absolute truth,” science emphasizes that it is the “most useful hypothesis.”
The reason I believe in science is not because it is perfect, but because it is what has deceived me the least in a universe full of chaos. The “practical results”—smartphones turning on, airplanes taking flight—reinforce my faith every day. In other words, science is not a tool for proving the truth, but a means of systematically managing the terror of not knowing the truth. I hold the elaborate map of science, but I can never know if the “order” drawn on that map truly matches the actual terrain of the universe.
Living Within the Most Structured Metaphysics
In the end, I have no choice but to admit it: I do not “know” science; I “believe” in it.
Science has not completely stripped away the mysteries of the world; it has merely wrapped those mysteries in the pretty packaging of “laws.” Within the most structured metaphysics called science, I willingly bet my entire life on the gamble that the world will not collapse tomorrow.
My reason is, in fact, another name for faith. What I call science may perhaps be a hymn of order that humanity sings together in the face of the vast silence of the universe.
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