Believers view science as fixed dogma while seeing beliefs as personal experience

Evidence

Whereas scientists usually take it for granted that scientific knowledge will only hold until it is replaced by better knowledge, believers often have a fundamentally different view of science: scientific knowledge is perceived as beliefs to be learned from textbooks and not to be doubted . As a consequence, one’s own beliefs are classified as at least equivalent, if not superior, because they are supported by personal experience. Nevertheless, even abstruse belief systems such as clairvoyance and spiritual healing strive for recognition by science, while at the same time rejecting it as a means of achieving knowledge . To reconcile both, often adventurous distortions of scientific theories, for example of quantum mechanics or systems theory, have to be used, which are presented as the latest state of research . Thus, believers often do not see themselves as opponents of science at all, but rather as ahead of the current, purely materialistic state of research. — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 195

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the psychology of motivated reasoning and the asymmetric ways different groups understand the same institution.
• SEED: Article angle: why religious and pseudoscientific believers see themselves as more scientific than scientists.

Related

• Believers experience their truths as felt certainty, not testable belief. (similarity 0.84)
• Science-skeptics misread science as memorized, unquestionable genius dogma (similarity 0.83)
• True believers hold convictions as unquestionable faith, not fallible knowledge (similarity 0.82)
• Irrational belief adherents often hold more factual knowledge than skeptics (similarity 0.82)
• Theoretical doubts about objective truth need not override practical reliance on evidence (similarity 0.80)
• Belief systems respond to contrary evidence by discounting the evidence (similarity 0.79)
• Believers routinely demand proof of nonexistence for supernatural claims (similarity 0.79)
• Scientists pursue truth by actively seeking invalidation of their beliefs (similarity 0.78)
• Former believers are uniquely valuable sources on how worldviews actually change (similarity 0.78)
• Aggressive rebuttals can push curious people toward pseudo-scientific views (similarity 0.78)