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The main difference is that for evolution most people can point to (or try to point to) a legitimate source of authority for why they believe evolution is true.

Whereas for religion, there is nothing to point to other than blind faith.



Who decides legitimacy and why is a university a more legitimate source of knowledge than a church?


> why is a university a more legitimate source of knowledge than a church

Because knowledge has to be justified in order to be knowledge. Universities produce justifications (in form of repeatable experiments, studies, proofs, etc.), churches don't.


Perhaps because at a university you can learn skills that you can utilize to create things and outcomes with relatively more predictable results.

If you need a complex surgery, would you like to go to a doctor or a priest?


So blindly believing in something is fine unless you're right in the end?


There’s a big difference between trust in a process that has so consistently yielded results vs something like faith or political adherence. It’s about the foundations upon which those results lie more so than the belief themselves, and also an amenability to update beliefs. If humanity really gets something wrong about how the natural world operates it will usually be revealed. The trust ergo is largely warranted, even if the human execution of said process is flawed.

The canard that every individual has to maximally recapitulate the entirety of hundreds of years of human discovery is just absurd. Trust exists at all levels of human intellectual discourse.




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