There exists no fundamental difference in the practice of science and religion when both accept existence of empirically unverifiable theory or accept existence of phenomena claimed to be perceived by only a very small fraction of the human society.
Science is principally based on believing what other people tell or write, and therefore does not truly differ from communication in religion. How often does it happen that only one individual or science team claims they empirically verified a hypothesis or perceived an understudied phenomena largely ignored by the human community?
Salut Marcel,
You may be interested to contribute to this thread:
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_Science_a_belief_system
As you know, there are many religions and even more personal attitude or interpretation regarding religion. Even the word religion is not appropriate for describing the whole range of spiritual practices. The scientific culture is less varied but it is also diversified and consensus is not achieved , nor achievable, in many areas. Just the question of the interpretation of quantum theory is an example where consensus has never been achieved.
My position is that all of us are totally open mind until about two year old. We learn to walk and to explore the world without any prejudice except the prejudice of our body structure and are not slave of any ideology. Then we learn to talk and so use a language whose words contain implicitly a theory of the world that goes back to the beginning of human history and our primary way of communication is through this theory. But until five years old we retain a lot of our natural creativity and openness to learn from evidences but then we enter school and then we are educated, our ideology become more and more specific, formatted and we start to communicated in this formatted way. Then some of us goes further and get higher education and there we get further and further formatted and then we become learned person and after all this formating process it is a miracle if some spontaneity, wonder about the world can get through this formatting filter in-built into our brain. Those that have retain less of it tend to enjoy powerfull position where they can beat out of other any trace of this.
So the question that subsume religion versus science is
dogmatism versus creativity and both in religion and science the real opposition is between conservatism and openess which does not mean that holding principles or ideas is being dogmatic or conservative. Dogmatism is not a choice but being imposed by the culture to conform. Truly holding principle is only possible if someone can stand back with some distance and make his/her mind but this is very difficult and the more ingrained into the collective consciousness is a given value, the more difficult it is to achieve distance because our brain get re-wired culturally from a young age.
Regards
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