The Faith of Science
I’ve come to the not too recent conclusion that science does, indeed require faith.
You often see in the more juvenile debates about evolution and creation the claim by creationists that science requires as much faith as religion. The creationists mean faith in the veracity of the evidence; faith that mutations are actually enough to produce drastic variation; faith that experiments are carried out correctly; faith that the results of those experiments are interpreted correctly. But that is not what I mean.
When I say that science requires faith, I mean a faith in science. Faith that science can find the answers it seeks - and, importantly, exactly those answers. It is, more precisely, faith that if something a theory is based on does not yet have a complete physical explanation, that it will at some point in the future. So long as that something has empirical evidence to support its truth, of course.
By way of example, take most of physics from Newton on. Gravitation was almost perfectly quantified, Einstein’s improvements over Newton being tiny relative to Newton’s own improvements over... well... Aristotle? Buridan? Kepler? The fact that gravity was just an apparent effect, with no explanation of its mechanism, was not a serious problem for any theory built upon it. It didn’t matter why gravity worked, so long as how it worked was accurately described. One could take it on faith that at some point in the future, someone would, in fact, discover a cause for gravity using the scientific method, supplanted by a healthy dose of mathematics.
In this sense, I think science does require faith. After all, it is entirely possible that there is something in the universe that is simply not accessible to the methods of science. Maybe God is real, and completely unanalyzable. Maybe there are other extant universes where our most basic intuitions, both psychological and mathematical, simply do not work.
But so far, there is little that has not buckled under the scrutiny of science, and most of those few things seem by no means unexplainable. So, scientists work with this faith, that their method will not someday be shown to be fundamentally flawed. And much like any given theory, science itself may experience some fundamental changes in the future, but will likely do so on its own terms.
You often see in the more juvenile debates about evolution and creation the claim by creationists that science requires as much faith as religion. The creationists mean faith in the veracity of the evidence; faith that mutations are actually enough to produce drastic variation; faith that experiments are carried out correctly; faith that the results of those experiments are interpreted correctly. But that is not what I mean.
When I say that science requires faith, I mean a faith in science. Faith that science can find the answers it seeks - and, importantly, exactly those answers. It is, more precisely, faith that if something a theory is based on does not yet have a complete physical explanation, that it will at some point in the future. So long as that something has empirical evidence to support its truth, of course.
By way of example, take most of physics from Newton on. Gravitation was almost perfectly quantified, Einstein’s improvements over Newton being tiny relative to Newton’s own improvements over... well... Aristotle? Buridan? Kepler? The fact that gravity was just an apparent effect, with no explanation of its mechanism, was not a serious problem for any theory built upon it. It didn’t matter why gravity worked, so long as how it worked was accurately described. One could take it on faith that at some point in the future, someone would, in fact, discover a cause for gravity using the scientific method, supplanted by a healthy dose of mathematics.
In this sense, I think science does require faith. After all, it is entirely possible that there is something in the universe that is simply not accessible to the methods of science. Maybe God is real, and completely unanalyzable. Maybe there are other extant universes where our most basic intuitions, both psychological and mathematical, simply do not work.
But so far, there is little that has not buckled under the scrutiny of science, and most of those few things seem by no means unexplainable. So, scientists work with this faith, that their method will not someday be shown to be fundamentally flawed. And much like any given theory, science itself may experience some fundamental changes in the future, but will likely do so on its own terms.