Why do we believe in math?

[MadMojoMonkey]

So don't believe in shit until it lets you get an edge in life?

I said nothing of the sort. I'm not telling anyone what to believe. I'm looking at the struggle to understand belief, and it's importance to humans.

If you ask me (no one ever does understandably) what my thoughts are on things like the big bang etc I come to the conclusion that they probably aren't right they are just much more right than everything else. Lots of very ITK scientists have problems with the big bang, or pick from a list of other long theories, yet that doesn't mean you can believe in any old shit to begin with.

Science doesn't make "facts" in the way that math does. Having problems with scientific theories is a core aspect of being a scientist. We're comfortable with some ideas and not at all comfortable with others... and we don't overlap one to another. ALL of our models are incomplete. It's just a matter of how deeply you dig past what "seems reasonable" to get to things that truly aren't well explained.

@ bold: You can definitely believe any old shit to begin, in the middle, and to end with. People are idiots. Self included. We believe all kinds of bone-headed things. Belief is murky, and inconsistency in a belief system is often not a fatal error.

It's very important to remember that the scientific community is their own little group of self jerking off wankers too. Not just religion. Anyone who spends their whole life on something and is shown to be wrong is going to be pretty cunty it just so happens that science has a way of moving forward to more correct* answers, religion, spirits, don't.

It also isn't an excuse to reject all the other really good stuff because ohh that's science therefore all science must not be true.

*More correct as in more usable for society not necessarily objective truth that's a whole other ball game.

Yeah. Point? Scientists hang out together because they agree about the utility of scientific method. They further clump into groups of chemists and physicists and engineers, etc. Then further clump into specializations, some of which can span an entire campus's science efforts. This certainly established a group-think tendency, and to a large extent, that's the goal. Sometimes it's detrimental to creative solutions, though.