Derek Thompson on why science is a special kind of faith:

We owe our electric age to scientists who were crazy, ignorant, or both. In his book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Richard Feynman writes that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” I used to hate this quote for its entreaty to conspiratorial thinking. After all, if scientists automatically distrusted every expert opinion, how would truths coalesce? How would knowledge accumulate over time? Wouldn’t we all just claim our own private reality in the face of expertise? But it’s the following lines from Feynman that make his point clear. “When someone says ‘science teaches such and such’, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it.” In other words, science is the opposite of blind faith. It is a reflexive skepticism toward received wisdoms or arguments from authority. It is the conviction that our own experiments, if carefully constructed, can reveal once-obscured truths. Science is a special kind of faith—a belief before evidence that the previous generation’s “truths” are, at best, half-truths, with half-lives, which will one day pass away and make room for the next generation of even more useful half-truths.