Scientific articles of faith: more on religion & science
Posted 08.13.2007 in Culture, ScienceI’m always thrilled when I get a rant in response to a post. It means that regardless of whether I said something brilliant or something obscenely wrong, it was provocative enough to raise an eyebrow or two. I suppose that when one starts talking about the science vs. religion pop phenomenon, such responses should be expected.
Let me make absolutely clear that by eliminating the false dichotomy between religion and science, I am not advocating science as a religion. I make no judgments about the relative merits of religious and scientific values. Judaism is not the same thing as microbiology, but it is the same kind of thing. If that statement irks you, read on. If not, read on.
First of all, evidence does not equal science. I agree that “evidence” and “faith” in their most basic senses are semantic opposites, but science is much more than just evidence-gathering. This is what I was trying to communicate in my original post: just as religion is defined by a broad set of cultural beliefs, so too is science. Just as religion permeates politics, education, social relationships, and all levels of human behavior from the individual to the global, so too does science. In fact, this must be the very definition of culture if we are to have any meaningful discussion about it.
Now, with that said, it should be clear that when I talk about science as offering salvation, liberation, and immortality, I mean that it offers those things in a broad cultural sense. These are not elephants to apples. Salvation? Science offers to fulfill our potential as individuals by contributing to the Internet archive of human knowledge and also as a species by offering ascent to the realm of the gods–be it outer space or cyberspace. Liberation? Nuclear weapons research promised to free us from war, and neuroscience and psychology strive to free us from ourselves. Immortality? Whether as a species through genetics or as individuals (memory storage, anyone?), science offers the same rewards that religion does.
It is phenomenally important to remember that what scientific culture accepts as evidence is inextricable from the physical tools that science uses. Microscopes, simulators, MRIs, and (of course) particle accelerators all produce evidence that the scientific community accepts. As such, the process of experimentation, presentation, and deployment of scientific research is determined primarily by the tools of science. So Manganelli’s confusion of the tools of science for science itself is understandable.
Which brings me to…
Science is much greater than the sum of its parts. When I say that science has the same cultural significance as religion, I’m not addressing faith in particle accelerators, but faith in the gestalt of science as a way of understanding humanity and its relationship to the universe. I might define religion as a set of beliefs that give the individual and the community particular relationships to the metaphysical. I would never claim that a particular tool–such as a particle accelerator–could alone create such relationships.
Finally, “admiration” is far too weak a word for describing the extent to which science permeates our lives. It’s pretty clear that science isn’t just about “admiring” its tools. Science is a fundamental belief–a faith–that the combination of theory and experiment can answer our most basic questions about the universe.
By the way, the Perseids were amazing. Wow.
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Positing that science is just as much a faith as religion is to confuse faith and trust. Perhaps the definition, “a fundamental belief that the combination of theory and experiment can answer our most basic questions about the universe,” is accurate, but the appositive is not. One doesn’t have faith in science, one trusts science.
Scientists trust that science will answer their questions, or that it at least has the potential to do so. That scientists believe that science will answer questions before they are actually answered is not faith. They’ve seen science work before, and that’s the foundation of the belief that it will work again. It’s trust. Trust based on past *evidence*, built up over time. As the popular saying goes, “Science, it works, bitches!”
When I asked how science could offer salvation, liberation, or immortality, I offered my own culturally-significant answers that are similar to the ones presented here, in anticipation of that kind of response. The effect of science on our culture is not lost on me. But it is an elephants to apples comparison because the salvation, liberation, and immortality that religion offers purport to transcend culture. Religion offers explanations and answers to questions that are irrelevant to culture, such as what happens to the conscious mind after death. Science hopes to one day answer these questions and to answer all of the other infinite other questions in the universe, but it does not claim to do so right now, nor that it even will ever be able to do so. Science may be able to answer individual questions, but there will always be at least one more question to answer. Science does not pretend to be the answer to anything and everything in the same way that religion does, or even to affect culture in the way that religion does.
Additionally, to take issue with the technicality of confusing the tools of science and science itself further accentuates the difference between religion and science. Perhaps the statements in the previous entry about science can only be applied to science as a whole, but my comments regarding religion can just as well be applied to individual portions of religion, such as specific gods or religious institutions. They are deemed just as infallible and limitless as specific religions are to those who subscribe to them.
If my pitfall is to confuse the tools of science with science, confusing science with the *effects* of science is just as much an egregious pitfall. That science permeates and has a profound effect on our culture does not change the very nature of science. Nor does religion’s effect on culture change the very nature of religion. If one is to analyze the differences or similarities between two things, it is essential to break these two things down to their fundamentals, despite whatever profound effects they may have on culture. For science, those fundamentals are evidence and repetition. For religion, those fundamentals are declared truth and unquestioning belief. Trust is created from the former, faith from the latter.
Thanks for continuing to push on these ideas.
You differentiate faith from trust by saying that trust is necessarily based on evidence, and suggest that faith is based on blind adherence to principles. I won’t argue semantics, since I’m not really thrilled about getting into a discussion on the nature of faith.
But despite semantics, I will say that faith is absolutely about evidence–just that what counts as evidence in religion is not necessarily the same as what counts as evidence in science. People with great religious faith will always present evidence for their beliefs, even if their evidence for their beliefs is “I just know.” Scientific culture demands evidence that can be reproduced and verified by the community, but religion tends to ignore materially apparent evidence in favor of intuition and the subjective experience of the sublime. Faith and trust, then, become a bit more intertwined than you suggest.
Unfortunately, language often isn’t precise enough with single words to carry on a discussion without any miscommunication. Often that means arguing semantics, or the precise meaning of various words. If not “faith”, then perhaps “evidence” is the word that must be focused on.
I would argue that the evidence demanded by scientific culture and the evidence provided by religion are the same in name only. As was pointed out, scientific evidence demands reproducibility and verification. Religious “evidence” relies on intuition and is subjective. (Note that I put “evidence” in quotes here not to pass judgment on religious evidence, despite my probably apparent bias, but to distinguish what I believe to be the standard definition of evidence from the meaning implied here.)
Merriam-Webster defines “evidence” as “something that furnishes proof”, and defines proof as “the cogency of evidence that compels acceptance by the mind of a truth or a fact” or “the process or an instance of establishing the validity of a statement especially by derivation from other statements in accordance with principles of reasoning.” (I will ignore that the word “fact” is defined as “a piece of information presented as having objective reality” because that has been discussed ad nauseam before.)
Evidence demands proof; it demands a process which establishes the validity of something. Scientific evidence has such a process, one that is well-defined by the scientific method. Religious “evidence” does not.
Consider the situation where a scientist sees a bright, white light come out of nowhere and take him away and deposit him in the same place after a few hours. A scientist would immediately see if there were anything unusual in the area that would indicate a strange object being in the vicinity for a few hours. He would perhaps search for marks on his body, or go to someone who might examine his blood content or the state of his brain chemistry. He might search public records or interview others to see if anybody else had seen anything strange in the area. If he didn’t find anything, he might continue to work against all odds to find some evidence, but he might also begin to question whether what he saw actually occurred or whether it was all in his mind. A lack of any evidence would suggest the latter. This scientist is going through the process which establishes the validity of his experience: proof.
Consider a religious person in the same situation. He would immediately attribute the experience to God and believe the experience to be fact, without doing any investigation.
Perhaps a more realistic situation would be a person who subscribes to the idea and processes of science, but does still believe in God. In this case, the person might initially attribute the experience to God, but would still carry out at least a cursory investigation to see if there is some more non-paranormal explanation to the experience. If such an explanation is found, it supersedes the attribution to God. It seems clear that even this person realizes that evidence is something that must be proven to other people, and I believe many people who fall into this category would agree with my assessment of what exactly “evidence” is, despite them being religious people. (My recent series of viewings of the X-Files seems to be quite an appropriate example of the contrast between science and faith, as is depicted in the constant butting of heads of the two main characters.)
Thus, I question the assertion that faith is based on evidence. Science is based on evidence. Faith is not.
Yes, science has a process which establishes the validity of a given experience. No, religion does not have a process which established the validity of a given experience. But a fact (gravity) held as true for a scientist is no less true than another fact (reincarnation) is for a Hindu.
X-Files is a great example, partly because it conjures up images of a fourteen-year-old me sitting terrified in my dark room with nothing but the eerie glow of an ancient television, and partly because you are absolutely right that Mulder vs. Scully is faith vs. religion. But the aliens are just as real and true and objective for Mulder as routine and disappointingly long skirts are for Scully.
From the article “Can we learn to love uncertainty?” by David Malone.
“Like alcohol, [certainty] makes us feel safe, but it is also making us stupid and belligerent.
Few notions have become as deeply embedded in our culture as the belief that there is a perfect certainty to be had - and the desire to have it. It has survived virtually intact the transition from religion to rationalism as the touchstone of our society. Even as science squeezed out belief in God and scriptural certainties, a perfect law-governed creation remained; it was just under new management. Science has become, in the minds of many, the new guarantor that there is certainty and that we can attain it….
We need to reach an accommodation with uncertainty. Not only is the universe uncertain, but so too is human knowledge. Science as a process should never have fostered any illusions about this: it was always about provisional truths, and knew it. Perhaps it’s time for us to finally accept that we shouldn’t believe in science because we think it’s certain, but precisely because it’s not.
Certainty is totalitarian. It forecloses further thinking. Not one of the theories devised by Newton, Darwin, Einstein or Planck is certain and perfect. Powerful and beautiful they undoubtedly are, but they are still partial and incomplete approximations of truth.
…The profound discoveries of modern mathematics and science show that life and thinking flourish only in the luminal and fertile land that lies between too much certainty and too much doubt. The art of scientific inquiry is to tack back and forth between the two.”
This person posts about it too:
http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2007/08/religions-dange.html
It is the closed-ness of certainty that makes it dangerous, whatever it is that people might be certain about, and it is more and more true in our increasingly global and pluralistic society.