Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Your example is misleading because that is in fact not how science or scientists work.
Yes, there is faith in science, but it is a reasoned faith. As more evidence is discovered that supports a hypothesis, and as all evidence that might falsify it is tested and found to be false itself, the probability of the hypothesis being true continues to increase. At some point it becomes "true beyond a reasonable doubt" (to borrow the language of the law because frankly the language of science sucks for communicating with laymen) and is promoted from a hypothesis to a theory and eventually to a canonical theory.
At every step faith is employed, but it is faith in the scientific method itself, a faith that has been earned because the scientific method has proven satisfactory for 500 years. We have faith in all of its components, most noteworthy of which are empirical observation, logical reasoning, experimentation, testing and peer review. We have seen theories developed by the scientific method for several centuries, and we have observed empirically that only a very small number of them have been falsified. This low failure rate makes science a useful tool for understanding and predicting the behavior of the natural universe.
This is very much like the faith I have in my wife. When I married her my faith in her was based in love, and as we know from empirical observation that faith is not always rewarded. But after thirty years of her unwavering devotion and positive contributions to our life, my faith is based on logic and experience. (And no, it didn't take the whole thirty years to reach this point.
)Religious faith is not like this at all. Religious faith is based entirely on hope that a supernatural universe exists which is unobservable and exempt from both natural laws and logical reasoning. Religionists hope that when they die they will prove to have "souls" which are then transported to an "afterlife" where they will be rewarded by a "god." There is no empirical evidence to support this hypothesis. It has never been tested by experimentation or any other means. It is not derived from logical reasoning like the faith of the scientist. It is derived from sheer unreasoning hope, like the faith of the little boy that his dog will come home even though he vanished a month ago. The little boy can't stand the sadness of believing that his dog met an untimely demise, and religionists can't stand the sadness of believing that death is exactly what the dictionary calls it. So they have faith that something that defies logic and empirical evidence will occur.
Our faith does. We have faith in the laws of probability. The more evidence there is to support a hypothesis, the higher the probability that it will never be falsified. This is the difference between faith based on reason and faith based only on hope.
The basic philosophy of science is that the natural universe is a closed system, and that its behavior can be predicted by theories derived logically from empirical observation of its past and present behavior. This stands in stark contrast to the philosophy of religion, which is that denizens of an unobservable supernatural universe are capriciously meddling with the behavior of our universe so we can never be sure what's going to happen next.
As a member of the L.A. chapter of CSICOP I attended a debate between a real scientist and a creation "scientist" back when that particular religious bullshit first became popular about 25 years ago. I found to my dismay that the people who were accepted as leaders of the movement were patently frauds. They carefully picked through the evidence and only presented the bits that seemed to support their hypothesis. They cited research from third-rate universities. And they had much better communication skills than the real scientists, so they were able to dazzle the audience with rhetoric and proper scientific terminology. Their goal was only to mislead people into supporting them, not to make any headway in the academic community.
And this is the reasoned faith of which I speak. We decide logically to accept the theories developed by other scientists because we know that they have been tested and peer reviewed by qualified people. One of the greatest features of the scientific method is that in order to peer review a hypothesis you don't have to be as well qualified as the guy who thought it up. So there are a lot more top-notch peer reviewers than top-notch researchers and everything has been reviewed to death.
When I choose to have faith in the DNA theory of terrestrial life, it is because I know that it has been tested for decades by thousands of scientists, and every one of them would be thrilled to be the guy who disproved it.
When I'm exorted to have faith that I'll meet all my dead friends in an "afterlife," I am given nothing to support that belief except that millions of really nice people hope it's true. Well all right quite a few assholes believe it too but that's a topic for a different thread.
We learn where to place our faith. When we're children we have no choice but to trust our parents, because living a life where we can't do that would be unbearable so it's worth taking the risk. We transfer that faith to our teachers and other people whom our parents have faith in. Faith in teachers is somewhat more rational, since hanging onto their jobs requires at least a modicum of peer review. But as we grow up we become capable of doing our own testing and peer review of the people who ask us to accept them as authorities. By the time we're adults we're not as likely to believe something we're taught without having in some way validated the authority of the teacher.
At least that's the way it's supposed to work.
I think the preceding paragraph sums it up. Religionists are like children. Living a life without gods and all that wacky stuff would be--for them--unbearable, so they trust an unreasoned hypothesis and take the risk that it will turn out to be invalid. In a sense it's a good bet, since if it's false they won't be alive to find out.