Is There a Difference Between Trusting Scientists and Trusting Preachers?

[Little lunch]

One things for sure.
I trust preachers and journalists takes on science equally.
I also like to know who is funding all this research and what's in it for them.
And if someone does fund research, whether they like the outcome or not, why would they bother funding peer reviews?
As far as I'm concerned, all religion is bullshit and a lot of science should be taken with a grain of salt.

[robvalue]

Indeed. Science is accurate, but it still has to be reported. Whoever filters the information can fuck it up, deliberately or otherwise.

[Alex K]

Another trouble is that the results of science aren't simple truths, they are often theory dependent, with shades of grey and degrees of certainty.

To give an example from a field I know (risking to sound like a broken record) - so people were using the Large Hadron Collider to look for the Higgs Boson, a particle that had been predicted by a very successful theory in which it was pretty much the last undiscovered piece. Now, in 2012 a discovery was announced because a deviation of ~5 standard deviations from the null hypothesis (no new physical effect beyond the known ones takes place) was seen.

Now, if you want to interpret this, you have to unravel a whole series of assumptions and observations.  First of all, was it a real discovery or a statistical fluke? The more measurements in different places you make, the more likely it becomes to see a 5 standard deviations fluke. This possibility was discarded because first of all, 5 sigma was still very unlikely to occur in the same place in two experiments, but also because of theoretical prior knowledge telling you that a particle is expected in this and this place with such and such properties, and the signals matched this expectation within experimental accuracy. Ok, so you have convinced yourself that it is not a fluke, and the signal looks like a new particle. But what particle? Is it *the* Higgs boson your theory predicted, and what does that even mean. So you keep measuring and the error bars shrink and the properties of the new thing are still within the predicted ones from your theory. Still, you haven't measured everything and there is still wiggle room because measurements always have error bars, and the new thing could be something closely related to the theoretically predicted Higgs Boson, but not exactly the same thing. Especially since you know that the very theory that gave you the prediction of the Higgs boson doesn't really describe the Masses of Neutrinos nor Dark Matter and therefore is necessarily incomplete, so the Higgs boson you discovered cannot possibly be *exactly* the one your theory predicted. Initially, they hadn't really measured the spin of the thing yet, and the relative certainty that it was a spin-0 particle like a Higgs boson is supposed to be, came as much from actual measurements of its spin as from the knowledge that it would be a huge coincidence for particles of spin-2 to accurately reproduce all the properties expected from the Higgs boson.

So after all those considerations, what do you tell everyone? CERN Director General Rolf Heuer on July 4, 2012 put it thusly:
"As a layman, I would say, I think we have it"

In the hedging and slight vagueness of those words lie all the considerations I outlined above, and probably more I don't even know.

[robvalue]

Good point. The more complex the subject matter, the harder the results will be to present.

But on simpler subjects, we just see the results.

"I can make a metal thing with wheels which moves at 70MPH!"

"Go on then."

"Here you are."

"Thanks.

"I can talk to God."

"Go on then."

"Mumble mumble..."

"Nice."

[chimp3]

Trusting the expertise of scientists is no different than trusting the expertise of an auto mechanic.

I would not bring my vehicle to a mechanic whose only credential is a claim to authority:

"I have never repaired a car before but I have a book that tells me everything I need to know."

I would not trust this mechanic. Especially if the book was written in 1949.

[Alex K]

Trusting the expertise of scientists is no different than trusting the expertise of an auto mechanic.

I would not bring my vehicle to a mechanic whose only credential is a claim to authority:

"I have never repaired a car before but I have a book that tells me everything I need to know."

I would not trust this mechanic. Especially if the book was written in 1949.

Or: I haven't looked under the hood yet, but I just had a personal revelation that you need to buy a new motor.

[chimp3]

Trusting the expertise of scientists is no different than trusting the expertise of an auto mechanic.

I would not bring my vehicle to a mechanic whose only credential is a claim to authority:

"I have never repaired a car before but I have a book that tells me everything I need to know."

I would not trust this mechanic. Especially if the book was written in 1949.

Or: I haven't looked under the hood yet, but I just had a personal revelation that you need to buy a new motor.

Or : You need a new Johnson rod. (Seinfeld reference)

[Gawdzilla]

"Read one book and think they know the answer to everything."  Ah man, if I were giving out prizes...

"Buddha save me from a person who has only ever read one book."

[SteveII]

You said a preacher's goal is "enlisting as many more believers as possible". That description is incomplete. You are missing a very important component: motive. A preacher's motive is not numbers, it's changing people's lives.

Science changed people's lives in a century, more than all religions did over millennia. And for the better, not worse.
Preachers only talk about changing lives - science delivers.

That is not a conclusion you can make because you are comparing apples and oranges. Even if you don't believe religion is true, it certainly has had an effect and purpose over the millennia. 

In general, the comparison "why do I accept the scientists and reject the preachers?" in the OP is just nonsense as well as a false dichotomy. I accept both.

That's because you don't comprehend either. To a simple minded lay-person both science and theology appear equally inscrutable and abstract. And even if you can see contradictions between religious doctrine and scientific observation - the magical thinking is so emotionally pleasing, that you ignore them, or accept lackluster, ad hoc apologetics, in order to keep up your dualistic, fantastic model of reality.

If the scientists told you that your smart-phone was operating on the basis of magic miracles from Jesus - you'd have no way of knowing if it was true. Surely - omnipotent god could have made the iPhone and neither you nor anyone you personally know can make one - so it must mean what you were told is true, right?

Luckily science, as a method of gathering and implementing knowledge works reliably and consistently, which is why it doesn't have a vested interest in deceiving anyone. Which is something you can't say about any religion.

What contradictions are there between science and religion? Your (and most of this thread's) false dichotomy continues to be nonsense. It will never be an either or. If you think it is, you have incorrectly understood one, the other, or both.

[The Grand Nudger]

Considering your repeated statements regarding evolutionary theory, the question seems more than a little bit disingenuous coming from you. You, yourself, know of a shortlist of contradictory claims...and you clearly have a method for rationalizing your rejection of good science in those instances, as we've seen on the boards, and as we see alluded to before you so much as finish the breath you started by asking for contradictions.