Originally posted by sonhouse
http://phys.org/news/2014-08-debating-science-withtrolls.html#firstCmt
Some of the tricks trolls pull trying to get their ideologue POV's across.
This article doesn't even go into the lies YEC's make about evolution but the MO is the same.
I read the article, most of the tricks listed are a little dull and are just the kind of informal fallacies one gets in all debates. The interesting one was the question about whether science is a religion. There are a lot of features that they have in common:
A Priesthood - where religions have priests of some form or other science has professors and so forth.
Policy - both science and religion have been used and misused to justify policies.
Why we exist - Both religion and science seek to explain the origins of the world.
There is even a similarity at the metaphysical level. Religions are based on the existence of a supernatural order, normally a God or gods whose existence is asserted, but unprovable. Science is based on a sentence such as: "Only empirically verified statements are true.". The catch is that that statement is not empirically verifiable. One can do what Popper did and reverse it, but then all statements which cannot be empirically ruled out are true, at least provisionally. So we believe results because they have been empirically tested, but the basis for this belief is untestable. This is the same as Hume's point about inference - really one cannot justify it, but we may as well believe it as we can get nowhere without it.
The error that these people make in their statements about trusting scientific results is to equate this metaphysical problem (Is the sentence: "Only empirically tested statements true" true?) with the actual testable statements made (humans evolved from apes, the universe is 13.8 billion years old, etc.). Unless one is actually going to adopt a level of scepticism where one doubts causation then attempting to use this argument in the context of specific results is obviously ludicrous.
The difference between science and religion is that science can provide results that do not require prior belief. It matters if a scientific theory is wrong in a practical way. If a religion is wrong then it does not matter in this world.