Deference to Authority Looks Like Science Until It Isn't
Americans who attend church regularly and express high trust in science are significantly more likely to believe in ghosts, curses. Other supernatural phenomena.
The finding reads as paradox. How can someone trust the scientific method while believing in things science has never authenticated?
The study measures "trust in science" through questions about vaccines and climate change — institutional verdicts rather than scientific reasoning. It asks whether respondents defer to expert consensus, not whether they understand how evidence works.
Someone can trust vaccines because the CDC says to trust them, the same way someone trusts their priest's account of the supernatural — both are deference to authority. Consider someone who has never designed an experiment, never read a peer-reviewed paper, never attempted to falsify their own assumptions. Their relationship to science is transactional. They outsource the difficult thinking to people in positions of authority, then accept the output. That same person can assign equal weight to supernatural claims because those claims also come from authority figures, just different ones.
They've learned to defer rather than think, which feels like deference to institutions that happen to be reliable.
”Church attendance provides social permission to hold both frameworks without reconciliation because the two never need to cohere. The real finding isn't about supernatural belief at all. It's about how institutional authority can proliferate unchecked when someone mistakes trust in experts for understanding of expertise. Someone can champion evidence-based medicine while accepting their company's unexamined metrics as gospel, praise data-driven decision-making while accepting whatever dashboard their manager built without inspection. They've learned to defer rather than think, which feels like deference to institutions that happen to be reliable. Until it isn't.
