Science as Faith

[kumarei]

I was listening to an episode of the Geologic Podcast today, and on it George Hrab used the recent news about Triceratops 1 to launch into a rant about how science and faith are different.

1. TRICERATOPS AND TOROSAURUS: SAME DINOSAUR, http://news.discovery.com/dinosaurs/triceratops-and-torosaurus-same-dinosaur.html [ ↩]

Comments

[lyceum_arabica]

So, I think it's impossible to make it so science is not at least somewhat based on faith. You've taken calculus... did you see all the proofs for all the theorems you used? Probably not, and even if you had a fantastic set of professors, it wouldn't take you long in math before the proofs got too long to show. You'd have to take it on faith that they held. You also don't actually read the original papers and work through the stats for every statement of commonly understood science... and we know that these statements get proven wrong on a reasonably regular basis (newton, einstein, schrodinger is the classic example, but there are many, many smaller ones). So any time you reference the authority of science in a field where you're not personally an expert, you're taking something on faith. You're believing in something, when the only evidence you have of it's truth is basically social... you believe the social system of the scientific community wouldn't let the statement get past if it were false. Which is frequently true...

[lyceum_arabica]

I suppose I should rephrase that first sentence, upon looking at your links...

SCIENCE, the pure artform itself, should be about as close to faithless as you can get.

But 'science', the thing you actually reference as a justification for a point in an argument or when reasoning about a problem, has a major component of faith (unless you're an expert in the specific field, and that field is well understood). And thus, ideally, should be handled with some care.

[kumarei]

I probably should clarify that what I was talking about was DOGMATIC faith, rather than just a soft belief. While I may believe a bunch of the things that I learned in high school, this belief is absolutely subject to change given evidence. I don't trust in the actual facts themselves, but rather in the scientific process that generated those facts; I believe in that process for the reasons outlined in the "Science is not Faith" articles linked to above. I don't think I have absolute faith in it, because given evidence I think it could be proven that the method of science doesn't actually map to the actual world (e.g. if the world is totally non-deterministic and probability is totally random, and all interactions we've seen so far are due to an incredible freak turn of chance; if 100% of the interactions in the universe are micromanaged by a supreme deity and only happen to usually work the way we've figured out right now because it's a fad god is going through

[endril]

You've taken calculus... did you see all the proofs for all the theorems you used? Probably not, and even if you had a fantastic set of professors, it wouldn't take you long in math before the proofs got too long to show. You'd have to take it on faith that they held.

Trusting an institution is not the same as faith, is it? I think everyone at a church knows that, in the end, not a single person there has a good argument for the supernatural claims of their holy book. It's not that the religious trust some other person to have the answer.

[kumarei]

I'm not sure that it's true that everyone knows there aren't any good arguments for the supernatural claims in their holy book. Some of my relatives, for instance, would argue that point quite vocally. For them, the arguments in "The Case For Jesus", for example, are quite convincing.

Many people in the religious community don't understand the scientific process, and as such they believe that the evidence for their faith is "Scientific". Once again, blurring the line between what constitutes scientific fact and faith.

[kumarei]

Sorry, that should have been "The Case For Christ", by Lee Strobel. As a note, I choose this book because it's one that I've already read. There are many others that could be cited, probably more accurately, in my previous comment.

[mindstalk]

Like the other commenters, I've found it personally useful to distinguish between trust and faith. What 'faith' means to religious people seems somewhat slippery and murky, but here I'm pointing at the Doubting Thomas, believing despite evidence, or believing without any evidence, end of 'faith'.

Re: science as religion... right, science itself isn't religious, but I've also thought that science as viewed had religious aspects. Scientists as priests, 'truths' as dogma, people asserting a belief in evolution or quantum mechanics when they don't understand them, so they're really just asserting that they acquiesce to the scientists.

OTOH I *did* get exposure to "the scientific method" back in grade school, and between classes or reading I've got at least a sketchy idea of the evidence behind various sciences. Of course, I'm probably unusual, and there's still a lot of trust involved on my part, but there's a deeper story than "the labcoats said so, so it is so!"