Science and Faith

Great Debates
1

I have heard several people say that science and faith are not exclusive. What about the view that everyone has faith? Not necessarily in “God,” or gods, but just faith–an unproved belief.

On the surface level, science doesn’t really answer anything. For an unprecise example:

Why do I feel hungry?
Because of complex biochemical reactions.

Why do I have complex biochemical reactions?
Because of the interaction of your molecules.

Why do my molecules interact?
Because of the interaction of the electrons.

Why do the electrons interact?
Because the quarks made them do it.

Etc, etc. We had Elements, then Atoms, then. . .well, you get the point.

Obviously not meant to be scientifically accurate, but my point is that there is no scientific answer, any more than there is a biggest number. By all appearances, science is infinite.

On a deeper level, you cannot prove anything without first having something proved. It’s basic logic: If all cats have six legs, and Betsy is a cat, Betsy has six legs.

But if you don’t accept that all cats have six legs, the argument is unnacceptable. It is the same with science. You must accept the definitions and assumptions before you can accept the conclusions.

I was just wondering if people agreed that those first
few building blocks of Science must simply be accepted on faith.

2

Those first few building blocks aren’t simply accepted, they are tested. Then they are tested again, and again, and again. If conclusive evidence turns up that tosses those initial building blocks on their head, new theories may pop up, which are then tested, tested again, and again, etc.

Science doesn’t accept anything on faith, it simply looks at things based on the evidence that we have at this point. If it changes tomorrow, science will happily keep cranking along.

3

The nature of proof itself is what science it. Proof has no part in faith. If you set out to prove your faith, if you succeed, you have belief, but you have paid for it with faith. A poor bargain, unless you have gained something besides.

In things of this earth, choose proof, and science. The benefit is there, because you will learn. In what you have learned, you will find ways to change the world to be more according to your will. In things not of this earth, choose faith, for proof cannot be had, and the search for it will lead you to despair.

Dominion over the earth must include understanding of the earth, so even for the classically minded faithful, the sciences are but tools, shaped by man, to exercise dominion over the earth. But in that regard, it is vain, and purposeless to seek to apply these earthly tools to understanding God. God is not apprehended with the mind, but in the heart, in the manner of a child.

Do not prove your faith, rather live it.

Tris

“I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.” ~ John Locke ~

4

Sorry, I must not have spoken clearly. You completely missed the point.

Let me just pose it as a question: What is real? And why do you believe that is real?
By itself that just sounds like stupid pretentious philosophy. But I mean, what is your standard of reality? What you can see is not always real (hallucinations and mirages). What you can feel is not always real (false sensation from missing limbs, or some Virtual Reality technologys if you like). So what is real?

Descartes answered that “I think, therefore I am.” By implication, thought is real. But what about people who are mentally ill? Are their warped (or however you choose to express it) thoughts also real?

DMC, how do you test to see if your thoughts are real? And if you cannot trust your preceptions, how do you know that your observations are accurate?

Of course, you do trust your senses. Everyone does. But the question is one of whether or not you are justified in trusting those senses, or if you are experiencing an illusion.
Triskadecamus, I didn’t mean faith the way the term is normally used, religiously. It is not that I think it can’t or shouldn’t be used that way, but it is not what I’m talking about. I mean the simple fact of assuming something to be true. For instance, you assume that you are alive (in the typical sense) this minute, but how do you know? Maybe you are a supernatural entity dreaming about being human. Instead of messing around with such silliness, however, you take it on faith that you are as you seem to be.

5

It was misleading to refer to science. I am not really discussing things on a science-book level; more like Philosophy 101. But what I had in mind is that everyone, everyone, is taking something on faith.

If you will submit to me a logical proof of anything at all that does start with an assumption, you will have proved me wrong. On the other hand, if you cannot come up with even one proof that does not require something else to be taken for granted, I will be right. That is my whole argument.

The trick is that, so far as I am aware, the definition of a proof mandates three things:

  1. A major premise
  2. A minor premise
  3. A conclusion

Both premises must be accepted as true, usually by earlier proofs. But you have to start somewhere, with something that can’t be proven. You can’t prove that the interior angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees unless you accept without proof that a straight line is 180 degrees. In this case, 180 degrees is defined as a straight line, but this is a circular argument, and therefore not a valid proof.

So, to restate: ** Can you scientifically prove anything without assuming something else?**

6

How are we supposed to prove our answers??? Riddle me that!

7

—On the surface level, science doesn’t really answer anything.—

But I would mark that as a great advantage of the process of science: it can have a limited and specific scope. This limited scope means that its hypotheses are falsifiable, and essentially, all parties can know what we are talking about, and the limits to what we are trying to explain. It only tries to answer questions one at a time. This allows us to build our knowledge little by little, instead of trying to take on reality all in one fell (and probably wildly inaccurate) swoop.

—But what about people who are mentally ill? Are their warped (or however you choose to express it) thoughts also real?—

Yes, their thoughts are indeed as “real” as anyone elses. But do not confuse the realness of thoughts themselves with the realness of to what they refer (i.e. truth claims about the state of the world). My thoughts about unicorns are real. But as far as I know, no unicorns actually exist. My belief that unicorns exist can be wrong. That’s the very fundamental of objective exploration: that hypothesises and beliefs can be wrong, thus requiring us to have various measures by which we can correct error. If we were infaliable, unable to think anything other than the truth, then we would never have any need for things like science and logic.

—I mean the simple fact of assuming something to be true. For instance, you assume that you are alive (in the typical sense) this minute, but how do you know? Maybe you are a supernatural entity dreaming about being human. Instead of messing around with such silliness, however, you take it on faith that you are as you seem to be.—

While one certainly could take it on faith, it is not necessary to do so. When we agree on certain basic axioms, we essentially are agreeing not to challenge their truth for the sake of discussion: i.e. we hold them to be true for the sake of the sort of discussion they allow us to have. Almost every single discussion one can have, for instance, requires simply taking for granted the axiom that “things can exist.” This axiom is completely unprovable (any evidence brought forth to prove it would beg the question), but even having a discussion at all about the world around us requires it. I personally don’t take it on faith that we exist: but I’m hard pressed as to what I could possibly talk about if we didn’t. Almost every discussion about truth is premised on the idea, and so I take it for granted for the purposes of exploring what it allows me to explore.

Indeed, a person who believes that we DON’T exist (despite the self-defeating nature of that assertion) can still have a meaningful discussion about existence by simply presuming it for the sake of discussion.

One major line of evidence in science is induction. Induction is never 100% proof, and it would be wrong to think that just because I have not passed right through my chair as I sit down it, that it could never happen. However, I do have strong inferential experience from myself and others that this doesn’t happen. I shouldn’t, however, start taking it on faith that it could never happen. Instead, I can just say only as much as I really know: that we’ve never encountered an instance in which it has happened, and IF reality has any consistent regularity (an assumption!), then it is not likely that it will happen either. That way I avoidthe complete ingorance as to the normal behavior of chairs that I would otherwise be stuck with, but without turning it into a matter of faith.

—Of course, you do trust your senses. Everyone does. But the question is one of whether or not you are justified in trusting those senses, or if you are experiencing an illusion.—

But this, ultimately, is not a question that can really be answered. If our senses are not at all reliable, then we’re sort of stuck, and we can discuss very little about the world around us. We presume that our senses give at least a moderately accurate picture of the world in order to discuss what everyone seems to sense being a common part of. If what we are discussing is just a collective illusion, so be it, but it hardly makes any difference to the discussions we have when we sit down to discuss things based upon the premise that our senses are somewhat reliable as means of gathering evidence.

8

Probably not, but so what?

This is an old, old argument usually used by people when they want to say that science is no more reliable or accurate than any other means of getting information or describing the world. The reasoning usually goes: Because science has to take some things on faith, that it is no more correct than things like astrology, tea reading, or casting sticks to foretell the future.

But the trick is to make as few assumptions as possible, and to try and check those assumptions now and then to see if they still hold true. That’s the big difference between science and other forms of investigation. Science will try to test its assumptions. If they don’t pan out, or are only partially correct, you make corrections and try again.

As to our perceptions, it may be fun to think about things like “what if the universe is completely different from what our perceptions tell us, and what if my perceptions are completely different from your perceptions, and we can’t trust any of them”, but what does that buy us? Not much. In order to do much useful investigation, we pretty much have to assume that our basic perceptions are correct as far as they go. If we don’t, we can’t get anywhere.

And if my perceptions match your perceptions (at least to the best of our ability to communicate them), and if those in turn match the perceptions of many others, we have pretty good reason to believe we have a fairly good basis to start investigating reality.

Yes, we have to assume some things. If we’re careful, if we continue to question and test those assumptions where possible, this seems the best possible (and indeed, the only reasonable) course of action.

Ugly

9

“Faith” is a loaded word to some on these boards. (I learned this the hard way in a similar discussion in the past.)

I’d essentially like to chime in with agreement with apos and further clarify your basic point.

Every epistemology ultimately rests upon axioms which are accepted as if they were true without actual proof within the epistemology. They are not, cannot, be proven deductively within the system. (Erislover refered to these as the God postulates.) Instead they have been tentatively accepted, usually on the basis of induction - All examples up to this point have been situations in which the axiom holds, therefore it is very likely that future examples will hold to the axiom as well. Our extensive testing of the axiom, our experience, leads us to have progressively less and less doubt about its veracity … but true science always reserves some doubt. It just regulates it. You could say that science accepts these axioms with a tentative faith. But that faith is never absolute. Show enough evidence to the contrary and we will induce that the axiom is false, and it is back to the drawing board.

Religious faith is another story. Religious faith is absolute; it maintains belief in the face of evidence to the contrary. Such keeping of faith is often considered as a test of ones beliefs. (Think of the pious Jew saying the Sh’ma even as he is burnt alive.) Tris illustrates the role of faith in a religious context.

10

Seems to me that a lot of things in science are taken on faith that the writers of the textbooks you read in college aren’t lying to you. Not an attack, just an observation. Perhaps it is only at the very elementary level of science that this takes place (Biology and Chemistry 101). But, for example, how many of us have had the luck to be able to view a molecule of water through an electron microscope? How many of us have been able to see that it is made of two atoms of hydrogen sharing electrons with an atom of oxygen? Don’t we just assume that water cohesion is an example of a hydrogen bond due to the molecule being polar?

Isn’t that something we just kind of accept on faith?

11

Most of you guys have got my point, and I agree. It is silly to argue about whether or not we exist, or are alive, or have dependable input from our senses.

Ugly got it best in one sense. I am not going to turn around and holler, “See, you don’t know if you’re alive or dead, so the tea leaves must be right!” But when you have gotten past all the proofs of science down to the point of abselout uncertainty, it is really no more than a choice to start accepting what sense you can make out of things as truth.

To begin where there is nothing, the first something that you take up is (so to speak) arbitrary. That the majority of people all prefer to believe their senses only proves that people prefer to believe their senses, not that they are correct.

The point here being that you cannot really scientifically blame anyone who starts out believing something–the Quran, the Torah, the Bible, whatever they want to call it–and accepts only what science fits that, because other people are starting out believing science and accepting only what parts of {insert religious text} which fit into science.

An argument against this is that science doesn’t accept anything, that it continually tests itself. On higher levels this is true. But I hope I already made clear that the first assumptions simply cannot be tested.

12

You do not have to “assume” anything in your above example. a line being 180 degrees is not an assumption. It is a reference. Man decided that 180 degrees is a straight line and that a circle is 360 degrees. Those are human values assigned to these items and are not something that relies on “faith”.

Anyway “faith” is not a part of science. There may be “truths” that we accept as true without direct proofs, but these are not simple accepted on “faith” they are tested and retested and attempts to prove them are ongoing. Many times advances in science involve discarding these “truths” when they have been found to be inaccurate. Religious"truths" are not subject to the same kind of ongoing searches for truth and in fact most religions will discard the proofs given them in favor of their “faith”. Scientific “faith” is based on reproducable effects and conclusions whereas religious faith does not. I personally see that the word “faith” is not appropriate to describe postulates and other “unprovables”. Scientists do not have “faith” in these postulates they simply accept them until another more accurae postulate or proof is found. Rarely though does a true scientist rely on his “faith” in those postulates. He relys on the reproducible effects and real world evidence of the truths of those postulates. Should the evidence no longer support those postulates a scientist will throw it out and attempt to form a new one. Science’s entire point is to move beyond simple acceptance of the world to a real understanding of it.

13

I was wondering if somebody would pick on that example, because you are right–in that case. And what you are saying about scientists testing their ideas and discarding them is at the very least sometimes right.

Where you are right is in matters like, say, the shape of earth, the posture of dinosaurs, etc. But you are thinking on the wrong level. The entire system of science is based upon the belief that humans can observe truthfully. It is a natural assumption, but that does not de facto make it correct.

Again, it is the idea of hallucination. We now have explanations of mirages and hallucinations, of course. But before we had invented ways to test the reality of mirages and hallucinations, we had no way of knowing whether or not they were real (while the illusion is in effect).

So. If we know that we can be fooled, how do we know that we are not being fooled?

I didn’t really want to bring in this example, but perhaps it will help clarify my point. In the movie The Matrix, human beings are being kept hooked up to a computer which is feeding data into their brains to make them believe that they are living “normal” lives.

If you are a scientist who always tests basic assumptions, test the assumption that what seems real is real. Take the hypothesis that you are hooked up to a computer which is making you “dream” reality, and try to disprove it.

I am aware that this is a negative argument. It isn’t fair to say that because something isn’t proven false, it must be true. On the other hand, we really have never proven anything at all. To quote Apos, “One major line of evidence in science is induction. Induction is never 100% proof, and it would be wrong to think that just because I have not passed right through my chair as I sit down it, that it could never happen.” Accepted theories are those which haven’t been disproved.

I can’t prove that we are hooked up to a computer, but you can’t prove that we aren’t. It’s a draw. Niether of us is more correct for believing what we do.

If you follow me that far, can you see the connection to my earlier post? We have no proof of reality–none at all. So we are free to take whatever we wish for Truth, and interpret our lives accordingly.

14

Lord Ashtar, don’t confuse “learning about science” with the methods of scientific knowledge. Any student always takes some information on the trust that teachers are not lying about past results.

Can’t say I understand you here.

Can I say that someone who chooses to ignore evidence because it doesn’t fit their particular religious belief, who starts out with a religious framework and “and accepts only what science fits that”, is not participating in a scientific mode of inquiry? Damn straight I can.

Not so. They cannot be deductively proven within the system. As Rhapsody points out, they are constantly tested. They hold only to the point that they continue to make accurate and useful predictions, that are not better and more comprehensively predicted by a theory based predicated upon another set of axioms.

Induction is a wonderful way of gaining knowledge about the Truth, but it is never certainty. Science is about getting closer to certainty with more accurate models, but never has certainty. Never will. Because ultimately is is limited by the limits of induction. Religion has certainty, so has no need of ever finding out about truth. The evidence for itself is tautologic. (Please note, I am a theist, I see a role for religion in my life, but it is not to inform about matters of science. Instead, I see them as complentary to my knowledge about the Universe as a whole)

(Lib, if you are reading, now I understand why you got flummoxed when I used the f-word.)

15

As to your simulpost. All we have is our perception of reality to go by. All knowledge is filtered through these perceptual mechanisms. We attempt to understand Truth as best we can through these filters and by extending them when we can. In so fart as they make consistent and accurate predictions about other thing that we can percieve they are accurate scientific models. If a model fails to make predictions, or fails to improve upon the predictive power, then it fails to be scientific. But for us, the reality that we percieve (directly or by extension) is the closest to Truth we’ll know. And is within the realm of science. What is beyond that ability to percieve is the realm of religion; is valuable, but is not scientific.

16

uh “in so far” not “so fart” Sorry. Freudian I guess.

17

Yes, you can say they are not participating in a scientific mode of inquiry. But you cannot scientifically say that the mode of inquiry they are participating in is any less right than yours.

“Religion is certain,” you say, but you seem to say that it should change to suit science. Did I get that right, or am I missing the idea?

Also, are you saying that we must accept what our perceptions tell us? This obviously doesn’t make sense, as I am doing the opposite right now. But I don’t understand what you are trying to point out.

I feel like something got flipped. I am not so much trying to say that religion is scientific; that would be trying to say that oranges are apples. What I am saying is that science is an orange, this religion is an apple, this religion is a pear. . .and they’re all fruit.

I am arguing against the idea I have sensed that one must believe science. Everything else can only be believed if it matches science. But you really only have to believe science if you believe that people can figure out the entire Truth (not that they already have, but that they can).

18

DSeid said, “Show enough evidence to the contrary and we will induce that the axiom is false, and it is back to the drawing board.”

But, at the basic issue, that is like saying: Show evidence that Evidence is not the only way to determine truth.

If I did that, I would disprove myself! Which, if you strongly hold the position opposite mine, would be what you want. The question would be a trap. But my point is that you have chosen to believe that evidence is the method of determing truth. There was a choice. Others may chose differently than you.

(You being a rhetorical device, not a specific reference to a person here)

19

Perhaps this needs to be broken off as a seperate thread. That would be fine with me, but I think this question is closely related to the one at hand.

Is the majority always right? In context of this discussion, I would point out that the majority of people do, in fact, use Evidence as a means of finding Truth (or should I say Reality?). And further, when the majority (but not all) of the evidence points to one conclusion, that conclusion is taken. That is the way science works: take the answer that coherently incorporates the most evidence.

But, as you Mother might tell you, if the majority of people jumped off a cliff, would you? (It violates the hypothetical scenario to get around the question by saying the people must have had a good reason.)

Seriously, we all know that the majority of scientific opinion was, at one point or another, wrong. Which issues science was wrong about doesn’t matter. The point is that the majority can be wrong, so you cannot consider a theory or opinion wrong simply because it is unpopular.

I don’t think anyone here has been conciously using the majority-rule argument as proof-positive, but it does make one’s argument easier to be in the majority. If science was not so widely accepted, people might have an easier time understanding the points I am trying to make.

If I haven’t made this clear, I am arguing a hypothetical point. I think a blanket dismissal of science is as unwarranted as a blanket acceptance (I know, I know; you cannot “accept” science, because science is The Question. So it is unwarranted to simply accept The Question as the way of finding truth.)

20

faith would call for you to jump
science would call for you to find out WHY.
Religion and science seem to be in conflict because they really are two approaches to answering the same question. Who and Why are we?

Science as we know it today basically grew from the failure of religion to answer the questions we needed answers to.
“Gods will” simply was not good enough when it comes to caring for a large populations well being. Religious leaders once considered holy and incorruptible were found to suffer the same fallibilities as the rest of us and really brought into question their teachings. Ultimately though they are very much intertwined and each tries to explain the failures of the other.