Yes, I disagree. Because I do not believe that anyone can believe in science only on the basis of cultural authority - because of the nature of science, that is inherently impossible, due to everything I’ve already argued and what @Nonentity and @anon50609448 have argued. Science, being something derived from the scientific method and not something simply spoken from cultural authority, will forever be something with evidence that must be contradicted also using the scientific method in order to be dismissed. To put it another way: science does not exist solely based on cultural authority, but religion solely does. Therefore belief in religion can be only on the basis of cultural authority, but belief in science cannot be divided from its origins, which is scientific method.
Yes, it does. Because it assumes that they can be given based on cultural authority alone. They cannot. Someone can LIE about whether something is science or not, and in that way bestow it based on cultural authority alone. But if it’s science, then no, they cannot.
The number of people that don’t understand - even if they are not eloquent enough to elucidate it - what science is and how it differs from any other random human thought, I do believe is at or near zero. If a living creature CAN understand what scientific method is (not retarded, of age, things like that), then they do. We all understand that science involves experimentation, with physical results or math results as proof. We all understand that this differs from all other belief systems. From there any individual’s understanding of science gets murky, but that’s all that is needed - we know “proof” is involved. We can distrust it, or trust it, but we know it exists and is necessary for anything to be “science”.
Even if you can’t buy the above, there’s also the argument that if someone doesn’t know what science IS, then they can’t believe in it. They can believe in something that isn’t actually science, but then what they believe in isn’t actually science. I can’t say that I believe in the Christian God and then say that the Christian God is a tree spirit. If I did that, I would ipso facto not believe in the Christian God.
@Nonentity put it best above, when he states that you either point to the evidence or can paraphrase the evidence yourself. Either way, you’re still using the same evidence to support your stance. When someone says “Physicists believe dark matter exists”, it is not a “naked argument from authority”, because anyone who said this would be able to include “…based on evidence that is freely available to be scrutinized.” That alone changes it from “from authority” to “based on evidence”.
You’ve said it, but it is still what you’re suggesting. By claiming that personal experience of evidence is different from accepting that evidence has been personally experienced by others, you’re claiming that the former offers a greater trustworthiness than the later. If you think that you can’t know something without personally experiencing it, but that you somehow can know something simply because you’ve personally experienced something you’ve decided is whatever it is you’ve decided it to be, then you are essentially raising the trustworthiness bar on that.
Semantics isn’t just about what word we use - semantics is the study of meaning. If the meaning of what we say is something you don’t give a shit about, then we probably have nothing more to talk about. But I suspect you do give a shit about this.
You want faith to mean something equal in two different contexts, simply because it’s the same word. Our counter-argument is precisely that it doesn’t matter what we call it - faith, belief, acceptance, whatever. It doesn’t matter. But the context does. If semantics = meaning, then yes, we’re all arguing semantics. If semantics = word choice then only you are arguing that a particular word choice demands an absolute definition in all uses.
