I like to treat religious people nice.

[emjay]

The way I look at this is that science progresses in spite of human bias rather than in the absence of it. For instance any major paradigm shift in scientific thinking often takes a while for everyone to get on board... some people more than others cling more strongly to the old ideas... for instance with quantum physics. But the transparency of the scientific process to criticism from outside parties, some of which with different biases... means that it is self-correcting in the long run; eventually the weight of evidence is overwhelming enough to overcome all bias against it and thus the paradigm shift is complete.

I don't think any self-respecting scientist, who values objectivity, would willfully introduce bias into their experiments... and would do as much as they could to eliminate it... and likewise be open to outside criticism with the same aim... but nonetheless, where emotion goes, bias often follows, so wherever there is emotional investment in something... in this case with scientists in their theories... bias can seep in. Not necessarily into the experiments themselves, but into the directions research follows... which can be a good or bad thing... and in how readily, or not, alternative ideas are accepted.

So at the end of the day, my view is that bias is not something to ignore as irrelevant to science... because it is relevant; science is conducted by individual humans, and humans are inherently emotional as well as logical... but rather just something to aim to be aware of and constantly vigilant against.

Sure, but religion is literally 100% bias and emotion. 'Faith.' If you base your decisions on rationality, even if it isn't pure science, it still will lead to a better outcome than a faith-based decision. For example, when people pray for the victims of mass shootings. That's nice, but what would really help would be reforming gun control or some other form of concrete action. It doesn't need to be contrasted by pure science for religious views to be wrong and detrimental compared to utilizing the best available information.

That's the problem; bias distorts/influences personal perception... such as seeing Jesus on a cat's arse , so if, as with religion, the only or primary source of evidence for belief is personal perception... 'personal experience'... then left unchecked it is doomed from the outset to snowball into a sense of unreliable personal certainty. And then, in tandem with that, where faith, prayer, and prophesy are concerned, if there are no failure standards whatsoever... where questions/prophesies are open ended and/or vague and always with 'god works in mysterious ways' to fall back on... and only personal perception of events is relied upon for evidence and always attributed to god, then that too can only serve to confirm the bias.

So you're pretty much preaching to the choir here, but the problem IMO is lack of awareness and/or care about the distorting effects of bias on perception by the religious...a failure or unwillingness to accept that relying on perception alone is an unreliable source of evidence. So effectively you've got 'a-psychology', 'apa-psychology' and 'anti-psychology' among the religious But I doubt that's likely to ever change on a large scale because naturally it goes against the grain to be skeptical of our own perception, even if we have good reason to be, so it's even less likely if there is a lack of education or interest in psychology. So basically, in my ideal world, psychology textbooks would be handed out alongside Bibles in church