Who Do You Trust?

In a piece at TCS Daily on why people believe conspiracy theories, I ran into this:

The secularist who chides religious believers for having faith in what the Church teaches will also tell them, in the very next breath and with no sense of irony, to shut up and trust the experts where scientific matters are concerned. That there are philosophers and theologians who can present powerful and sophisticated justifications of religious belief is taken to be no defense of the average believer - he ought to "think for himself," says the secularist. And yet while the average secularist couldn't give you an interesting explanation or defense of quantum mechanics, relativity theory, or evolution if his life depended on it, the fact that there are experts who can do so is taken by him to justify his own faith in their findings.

It seems to me treating scientific experts differently from religious experts is a sensible distinction.

For all the disagreements and changes in science, there is a large area of consensus. (When there isn't, or some idea is fairly new, it does make sense to be more skeptical.) Meanwhile, there are numerous religions with mutually exclusive beliefs. Unless you make judgments regarding their "powerful and sophisticated justifications," how can you decide which "expert" to go along with?

Furthermore, science has a great track record. Every day we see hundreds of examples of scientific principles in action--even if we don't completely understand these principles. And we can easily think of countless more. Meanwhile, it's hard to say any religion has "proved" that it, or its constituent parts, work except to its adherents on a subjective level.

Also, religion often asks you to believe supernatural things, or have faith, while science can show you objective evidence available to everyone.

Finally, there are simple experiments anyone can do, and basic books anyone can read, that make it possible to understand scientific theories, and realize they're well-grounded. There aren't any similar experiments or activities that work so well with religion. (Perhaps there are. There certainly could be. I'm just not aware of them.)

I don't want to make this out to be science against religion. I'm just trying to note that the two are very different, and should be thought of differently. What scientists do is also very different from the work of philosophers or art critics. In fact, one thing that makes science so successful is it sticks (for the most part) to a limited domain, and stays away from messier, not easily measurable things like morality or aesthetics. For that matter, when experts in any area--law, religion, history, whatever--stick to objective, verifiable facts, it's easier to accept their claims.

We can only learn a minute portion of what is known, scientifically or otherwise. Still, that doesn't mean we can't make rational choices regarding what kinds of experts to believe. Accepting a scientific explanation but deciding to "think for yourself" in other areas may make sense.