What do people who dont trust science trust instead? Not the religious nuts who would prefer to pray away an illness than get treatment, but the rest, lol.
Follower of Christ here. The short answer is, you can't trust anything. Science is neutral and good because, if true, you can reproduce and see for yourself. The problem is, you can't trust the reporting. I see science-related reports the same way I see political reports – bias with an incentive to lie.
If I were well-versed enough to read the white papers, I would probably trust it a little more. But even then you can't be certain unless you perform the experiment yourself; it's not uncommon for scientists to leave out inconvenient data to get the result they want.
Such is the state of this world – you can't truly know a fact for a fact unless you actually see it for yourself. And even then there's room for doubt :)
Thats certainly better than trusting just to faith to solve things and understandable. I would say about the same. Its an interesting philosophical problem, what we know, and how we know it. I guess instead of black and white trust or not trust I would rephrase and question peoples distrust of highly likely things.
Ah, but then you get into the trouble of what "highly likely" means :) Outside of common observances, the "truths" that we know are only known because they happened to be spread by society – much like how DNS works.
Here's a thought experiment. The government has assisted in pushing the idea of "eggs are bad for you" for decades. In effect, many people truly believe that "eggs are bad for you" is a fact. If you, being slightly more knowledgable in the subject, tell one of those people that this is a load of bollox, and have a paper to back it up... would you actually convince them? You'd be one voice against many; a rebel against history. If you did managed to convince them, would it be due to raw truth, or due to the effectiveness of your rhetoric?
True, that is a whole rabbit hole in itself, but I think you know what I meant :D. I do subscribe to that line of reasoning myself.
Though most things are at least a little subjective, there is always lets say a confidence value or percentage everyone could apply to some bit of knowledge, and while those may vary significantly across the population, some things could just objectively be said to be more likely than another. I dont think much of anything is 100% true, but 99%? Sure.
Im like, 99.99999% sure that this laptop is real and is about to run out of power, but I could be wrong.
Certainly, I didn't mean to go so far as to say what we can see and touch might not be real. As far as I'm concerned, that's covered in the "common observances" I mentioned in my previous comment.
The "truths" I was referring to are things we can't verify ourselves (due to practicality or lack of knowledge), yet are commonly believed or taken for granted. Some examples:
