Science and Reason

Why We Value Science

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  Religion gives you stories. Those stories are mainly intended to teach moral lessons, not to explain the physical world.
  
  Science gives you explanations. Explanations that are useful in working with physical things
  
  Look around the world today and you see a lot of fat people.
  
  Religious explanation is that they are sinners - sin of gluttony. You're fat because you can't control yourself, or you've given in to Satan's temptations. And because it's the fault of sin, the remedy is prayer.
  
  You can guarantee two things - every fat Christian has tried to pray away the obesity and in every single case prayer has failed.
  
  Science says you are fat because humans spent thousands of generations on the African savannah where there was a constant threat of starvation. Science says that we are the descendants of the people who survived famines. They survived because they were better at storing as fat any food they could get. Science says that the ones who were good at storing fat were the ones who survived to reproduce, and they passed on those fat-storing genes to their descendants. The ones who weren't good at storing fat failed to reproduce.
  
  (This is an over-simplified version - there are other factors involved as well, but the adaptation to store fat is the basic reason behind modern obesity.)
  
  Same with all our modern medicine - the more we understand about causes of health issues, the better we are able to deal with them.
  
  And we can measure the impact.
  
  From 0 AD, for 1800 years, prayer was your only hope if you got badly injured, sick, or had a child. And when God was in charge, average life expectancy was 40. Today, life expectancy is twice that. And it is due to science - scientific medicine and sanitation.