Changes in Religious and Scientific Belief

I have conquered my addiction to reading and posting on Quora, but commenter Earl Wajenberg (Wind off the Hilltop) still has his.  Occasionally the fit takes him, as it does the Tooks from time to time, and he answers a question that deserves a solid answer, mostly because it should never have been asked. I thought the analogies had good teaching properties.

How do scientific theories evolve over time, and why do scientists accept those changes more easily than religious belief changes?

Science is a method of investigation, so its findings will keep changing as investigation continues.

Religion is not a method of investigation. It is a way of reacting to the awesome and the ultimately important. Therefore, it is all about the thing it is reacting to. Change the understanding of the religious object and you change the religion.

Change the understanding of the object of scientific investigation and it’s just time for another round of peer review (usually, unless you have a real paradigm-breaker).

If you’re researching a historical figure and you start by assuming she was born in England and named Mary Johniston, née Smithers, then learn that she was actually born in Austria as Elizabet Maria von Uberwalden, married at age 16 to Karl von Schadenfreude, ran away to England at age 18, took the name Mary Smithers, managed to drop her accent entirely, but never quite got around to finishing the divorce proceedings before (oops) marrying Johniston and having three kids—well, all that is very interesting, but not nearly as upsetting as if you are Johniston and discover all this about your not-quite-lawfully-wedded wife when she has a little too much wine on your tenth wedding anniversary.

The historian is like the scientist. The husband is like the worshiper.

I’m not saying that all religion is or should be a matter of having “a personal relationship with Jesus” or whoever the deity is, but a religion is about your soul or destiny or purpose, or the souls or survival of your people, so it takes a lot less kindly to tinkering than almost any change to a piece of science. Changes to science will change how you understand something, and maybe change how you understand almost everything you’re interested in, but it has to reach a rare fever pitch in a few deeply dedicated individuals before scientific changes keep them awake all night biting the pillow.

Concrete example: There is a movement in modern conservative Christianity saying, “For centuries, people have been concentrating on the issue of ‘How do I get to Heaven’ when really the issue should be ‘How do I advance the Kingdom of God.’” There is also a long-standing effort in theoretical physics to extend the standard model of particle physics so as to explain a number of loose ends and puzzles. People are going to have a lot more emotion and argument about Heaven and the Kingdom of God than about super-symmetry and loop quantum gravity, though no doubt the latter will be intensely important to some specialists and of considerable interest to a number of their colleagues.