I apologize for the sloppy editing of yesterday’s post. I try to be careful, but it is in the nature of daily blogging that occasionally one’s vigilance will waver, and poorly proofread material will go into print. The post contained both a repeated passage and a mistaken double negative, both of which have been corrected.
I do seem to have been harping on religion and politics too much lately, but unfortunately I’m reminded daily how important they are. There is vociferous debate all around, and I hate to let some of what I read go unrebutted.
One move I see often in the theist-atheist conversation is the suggestion that naturalistic scientists indulge in a form of faith that differs in no important respect from the theist’s faith in God. In fact, we see it in the post I linked to yesterday by our friend the Maverick Philosopher:
Some skeptics appear to worship Doubt Itself, or else the power of their minds to doubt everything ”” except of course the validity of their own skeptical ruminations. Others, like Carl Sagan, appear to worship science. Humanists often enthrone Humanity, as if there were such a thing as Humanity as opposed to just a lot of human beings. Futurists expect great things from the Future: does not that smack of idolatry? Our human past has been wretched; why should we think that our future will be any better? The quasi-religious and idolatrous nature of Communist belief has often been noted. Environmentalists often appear to make a god of nature and its subhuman inhabitants. One thinks of Edward Abbey in this connection, and those who, like Al Gore, display quasi-religious fervor in their zeal to protect the environment from global warming and other real or imagined threats. Naturalists can be found who attribute divine attributes to nature such as necessity of existence and supreme value.
There is a lot in this paragraph, and indeed much to agree with. Dr. Vallicella is quite right that political movements often hijack the religious impulse for the furtherance of their worldly ideology. It is a common tactic of the most successful totalitarian systems to redirect the worship of the citizenry from their Gods to their worldly leaders; the personality cults that so many of these regimes impose can be understood as a skillful co-opting of pre-existing religious machinery. The charge so often made against secularism — that the greatest crimes of the 20th century were committed by irreligious regimes — ignores this important fact; but it is arguably to the extent that these regimes aroused the same emotions of faith that they were so successful. And the anti-global-warming movement, to examine Bill’s contemporary example, has indeed established itself in ways that have much in common with soteriological religions: there is a sacred entity (the “planet”), whose wrath we have incurred, and it is only by the right sort of atonement and intentional suffering (reducing our “carbon footprint”) that we may walk the path of ecological salvation. It has a high priest, of course, too (as named above), and adherence to the faith is so absolute in many quarters that even to express rational skepticism, for example by pointing out that Mars appears to be warming as well, is to risk making a pariah of oneself.
But I have several disagreements as well. In particular I object to the notion that scientists “worship” science with anything akin to religious piety; the most that can be said is that scientists believe that the scientific method — which is in essence nothing more than productively organized curiosity — has shown itself to be an extraordinarily effective means of learning about the world around us. It needs to be said again, apparently, that there is no scientific result or model that could not be overthrown tomorrow by a collision with the facts; every scientist knows this, and any who denies it denies the essence of science itself. But what possible fact could throw theism of the sort Dr. Vallicella professes off its rails? None, it seems, and so to suggest that a scientist’s well-justified confidence in science as a way of learning truths about the world is indistinguishable from religious faith is entirely unwarranted. In the paper we linked to yesterday, Antony Flew makes this very point:
Now it often seems to people who are not religious as if there was no conceivable event or series of events the occurrence of which would be admitted by sophisticated religious people to be a sufficient reason for conceding “There wasn’t a God after all” or “God does not really love us then.” Someone tells us that God loves us as a father loves his children. We are reassured. But then we see a child dying of inoperable cancer of the throat. His earthly father is driven frantic in his efforts to help, but his Heavenly Father reveals no obvious sign of concern. Some qualification is made — God’s love is “not a merely human love” or it is “an inscrutable love,” perhaps — and we realise that such sufferings are quite compatible with the truth of the assertion that “God loves us as a father (but, of course, …).” We are reassured again. But then perhaps we ask: what is this assurance of God’s (appropriately qualified) love worth, what is this apparent guarantee really a guarantee against? Just what would have to happen not merely (morally and wrongly) to tempt but also (logically and rightly) to entitle us to say “God does not love us” or even “God does not exist”? I therefore put to the succeeding symposiasts the simple central questions, “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?”
“But,” you might say, “we’re talking about faith in science itself, and you’re just talking about confidence in this or that result. What religious people are objecting to is the atheist’s arrogant belief — faith! — that science can give all the answers.”
But this is to misunderstand a scientist’s attitude toward science. No scientist can know in advance that any particular mystery will be unraveled by scientific inquiry; no scientist has that sort of “faith” in science. What scientists do have is optimism, based on the impressive results that modern science has already delivered in its first few centuries of application, and on the accelerating pace of discovery. But “faith”? “Worship”? No. We don’t operate that way.
On to Carl Sagan, then: did he “worship” science? Absolutely not. He was moved very deeply by the wonder and mystery of the Cosmos, and he wanted to understand it, to learn what was true about it. And he saw early on that that it is science, not religion, that gives the most consistent results. As he put it in his Gifford Lectures, now collected in the book The Varieties of Scientific Experience:
Questioner: The religionists proffer ghosts and miracles. The physicists propose equations. What is the fundamental difference between them?
CS: A very good question. How can we tell what’s what? One thing we can do is we can check out the explanation in terms of repeatability. Verifiability. So, for example, if physicists after Isaac Newton say that the distance that a falling object falls in time t is a constant times t2, and if you are skeptical or dubious about that, you can perform the experiment, and you will find that if it takes twice as long to fall, it goes four times farther, and so on. They will also say that the velocity increases proportionately to the time. You can check that. You can drop boulders off bridges, if it’s permitted by the local police, and check out these contentions. After a while you get a sense that, at least in this limited realm, the physicists know what they’re talking about. What is more, it is remarkable that Buddhist physicists find just the same regularity. And Hindu physicists, and atheist physicists, and Christian physicists, and so on. All find the same laws of nature. Somehow it doesn’t depend on the local culture, on the local training. What the physicists say seems to be true all over the Earth. And then you look at other planets. Other stars. Other galaxies. And the same laws apply everywhere. Now, this doesn’t say that every contention of every physicist has this wonderful degree of regularity. Physicists make mistakes just like anyone else. But the way in which physicists have an advantage is that there is a tradition of skepticism and a tradition of mutually checking out each other’s contentions. Whereas in religion there is a practice of great reluctance to challenge what any other member of the professional caste says.
Dr. Vallicella says, in the paragraph quoted above:
Futurists expect great things from the Future: does not that smack of idolatry? Our human past has been wretched; why should we think that our future will be any better?
I’m not aware of it being a central tenet of scientific “faith” that the future is guaranteed to be rosy; quite to the contrary, I, as a scientifically minded nontheist, imagine that there is going to be an awful cataclysm during the next century, as the great mass of humanity strains the Earth’s carrying capacity ever further, and as teeming Third World nations attempt to hoist themselves toward First World lifestyles. This will be simply unsupportable, and I think it is going to get very unpleasant. But what it is safe to assume is that scientific inquiry will continue to disclose the involute order of the natural world, and that this growing understanding will make possible technology that would seem to us as magical as a cellular phone, or a laptop computer, would have appeared to Saint Anselm. Yes, our human past has been wretched, but even a shelf-stocker at Wal-Mart enjoys creature comforts, medical care, and a life expectancy that would have been the envy of the King of England a thousand years ago. And if our future is to become less wretched — if the many woes that still vex and afflict us are to be ameliorated as the future unfurls — we are going to need increasingly sophisticated tools and techniques, and it is science that will provide them. Meanwhile, the irreconcilable inconsistencies among the world’s religious dogmas — belief systems that are by their very design irrefutable, and therefore almost impossible to extirpate — continue to be an inexhaustible wellspring of sanguinary conflict.
There is more I’d like to respond to in Bill’s post — in particular his remarks about materialism and consciousness — but it’s late. We’ll return to this shortly.
25 Comments
I don’t think you’re acknowledging and fully addressing the real religion/scientism issue, which is that “religion” is a potentially different mode of inquiry, or of knowing — and it does not necessarily reject the scientific methodology of testable hypothesis, falsifiability, etc. It’s the confusion of inductive versus deductive reasoning, and the rejection of certain kinds of induction, under the guise of being “unfalsifiable,” that generate the divide and the mud-slinging.
Hi Jess, and thanks as always for reading and commenting.
To the extent that religion generates independently testable and falsifiable hypotheses, then it is indeed scientific, and welcome. But can you give us any examples of that?
What kinds of induction are you suggesting are being rejected? The unfalsifiable hypotheses I am talking about are of the sort that Flew addresses in his paper – the “God loves us”, “God has a plan” kind of thing. (Or, for that matter, the “God exists” kind of thing.)
While you, and indeed, most physical scientists, do not worship science, there are a lot of atheists and (predominantly) social scientists who, by all appearances, _do_. Your lack of science-worship, is, in fact, why I continue to read your blog (that, and the lack of name-calling that infests other blogs).
Hi Eric,
Thanks for that double-barreled, apophatic compliment. I do try to be civil most of the time, and I certainly don’t worship science (or anything else, for that matter).
I’m glad to have you as a reader.
I second Eric’s observation about reality (though not prevalence) of “science worship” in some sectors. The image(s) of science gracing heathen altars, though, bears only a faint resemblance to the real thing — not so different from standard theistic fare.
An excellent essay, and one that does a fine job of explicating the fundamental difference between religion, which is faith-based, and science, which is based on observation and inquiry.
Scientists do not “worship” science. They use it. Science is a tool, a way of looking at the world.
I find that the only people who really have trouble reconciling faith with the world of science are those that believe in the Literal Truth of a given set of scriptures. That always amuses me, as said scriptures generally have been filtered through at least one translation.
A tip o’ the chapeau to Kevin Kim, who referred me to your site.
Hi Elisson, and thanks for dropping by. You have an interesting blog of your own, and I’ll add it to our sidebar.
You are right – despite pleadings of theists to the contrary, science is not based on faith. There is indeed a confidence the the world is a lawful place, and that its regularities can be understood with patient and systematic effort, but always the awareness that any theory, no matter how well-supported, may stand in need of modification – or even outright rejection – if the facts don’t agree. But the confidence and optimism of scientists is nothing like religious faith. L
Likewise, scientists are often accused of having their own religion, namely “scientism”: the faith that the natural world – the “space-time system” – is all there is. Again, this is a subtle but pernicious mischaracterization. This is not an article of faith; it is a provisional model that we adopt because it is simpler than any other, and does as good a job of explaining the phenomena. Bill V. will object that it doesn’t explain consciousness, or ultimate origins, but more on that later.
Malcolm –
I must disagree with your claim that science is not based on faith. Every scientist I know operates with an assumption that at least bits of the world are intelligible. Obviously, the content of this assumption is minimal in comparison to the content of assumptions made by most religionists, but it’s an article of faith nonetheless. Assume the opposite and science can’t even find its way to the starting line.
It’s not faith, Bob. As I said, there is a confidence that the world is a lawful place, but this confidence is based on the fact that all our empirical testing supports this assumption. Yes, as Hume made clear, this is all pure induction, and we know we have no guarantees that these lawful regularities might not be suspended ten seconds from now. But until they are, it appears that we might as well trust them (with the tacit undertanding that this trust is provisional), because all our tests, for hundreds of years now, have lent unexceptioned support to this view.
This is in striking, diametrical contrast to faith in God, which rests on no such empirical foundation whatsoever.
Malcolm – You missed the point of my remarks. There is no inductive support for the claim that the world is intelligible, since the whole notion of inductive support is bound up with the assumption in question. Perhaps my point will be clearer if I put it in terms that reflect your reference to an “empirical foundation.” If empirical methods presuppose such an empirical foundation, then those methods are incapable of establishing that there is such a foundation.
Hi Bob,
No, it is a purely empirical matter: if we try to make sense of the world, and find that we can, and try some more, and manage to make even better sense of it, and then begin to write down laws, and find that the world seems to obey them without exception, even in distant galaxies, we can begin to be confident that the Cosmos is an intelligible, lawful place. This is indeed inductive, in that we generalize from the limited set of laws we have already explicated to the more general notion (or “confidence”, as I described it above) that the Universe itself is lawful at all times and places, and in yet-undiscovered ways. This optimism is as close as science comes to “faith”.
In fact we make the inductive leap every time we get on a plane or an elevator. We assume that the world is intelligible enough that the machines we have built on the intelligence we have gathered so far will continue to work.
Malcolm – I don’t think you can get the ball rolling in quite the way you imagine. What does it mean to “find that we can make sense of the world?” Induction won’t tell us that we’ve accomplished this. We have to assume the world “makes sense” in order to justify any “trust” we place in the output of inductive procedures.
Please note that I’m not claiming that faith in the intelligibility of the world is “on a par” with whatever religionists might put their faith in. Religionists are like scientists in that they have faith in the intelligibility of the world, but they also seem to have faith in a particular sort of story about why the world is intelligible. I think it’s the content of faith, not the bare fact of faith itself, that distinguishes science from religion.
Hi Bob,
What it means to “find that we can make sense of the world” is to do exactly what inquisitive people have done all along: to guess at possible regularities in the phenomena we see, and then to note that the explanatory models we make do in fact give us some predictive and technological power. It is an empirical, pragmatic process. Although such an activity is indeed inductive, it’s not something we need to invoke definitions of induction to do, or that we need induction to “tell us that we’ve accomplished”; we just do it, and the practical value of the results are all we need. As we proceed, our confidence that the world is graspable in this way is reinforced. But that isn’t “faith”, nor need it be.
Malcolm – So we just do make sense of the world. Wow! But then, if the spirit moves you…
At this point, we might need a working definition of “faith.”
My own take is that there is a sort of continuum or sliding scale of faith, with lower-case “faith” representing the pragmatic assumptions, presuppositions, etc. that inform our ordinary moments, and upper-case “Faith” representing the more explicitly religious form of deep trust known especially to theists, but also to others not obviously theistic in outlook. Thus for me, “faith” and “Faith” are different in degree, not kind.
A sliding scale might not be the best way to picture something as potentially complex (or simple!) as faith, but “degree, not kind” is the basic idea I hope to contribute to this discussion.
It might therefore be correct to suggest that scientists “have faith” in a particular method (where “faith” is taken to mean something like “basic trust”), but this is very much in the lower-case “f” range of the spectrum, where even many fundamental assumptions are open to revision — as opposed to the unshakable, unbreakable Faith of the Christian who knows that heaven awaits those who lead virtuous, loving lives.
So saying “scientists have faith” in something isn’t really the same thing as saying “Christians have faith in Jesus.” At the same time, however, something ties “faith” and “Faith” together; I don’t see those two terms as mutually exclusive or diametrically opposed concepts. At the very least, they are distant cousins.
More later, perhaps. Great food for thought in the post and ensuing discussion.
Kevin
Hi Kevin,
Thanks for that excellent comment. You are quite right; much of this argument arises from efforts to make a binary distinction — “is it ‘faith’ or isn’t it??” — where none really exists. The theist sees the scientist’s mind working down at the low end of the faith spectrum, and, since the choices are reduced to 0 and 1, promotes the scientist’s confidence to a 1, dead level with his own religious faith. The scientist does the opposite.
It’s what Dawkins calls “The tyranny of the discontinuous mind”, and it comes up all the time, as I’ve mentioned before.
I take it that what ties “faith” and “Faith” together is that both involve adopting certain “givens” for which independent evidence is not forthcoming. That religionists and scientists both do this shouldn’t be controversial.
I don’t think it’s helpful in this context to contrast scientific fallibilism with “unshakable, unbreakable” religious faith. First, an assumption about the intelligibility of the world is not optional for science — you can’t have scientific reasons to think the world impenetrable to reason. Second, religious faith is well known to be shakable and breakable.
Hah! “It’s the confusion of inductive versus deductive reasoning, and the rejection of certain kinds of induction, under the guise of being ‘unfalsifiable,’ that generate the divide and the mud-slinging.” And religious Faith, as Kevin puts it, can be so far out ahead of what is falsifiable (and can be so tortured-looking) that some may try to parse a qualitative distinction between it and their own mentation.
However, Jess, there is a key difference between the sort of induction that science does, which is continuously narrowed, modified, and revised in response to an ever-growing base of experimental results, and the induction of religious faith, which is based, it appears, upon no objective data whatsoever, and is subject to no such checks and constraints.
Bob, he’s in retreat in re induction; in departure, he now attacks the BACK end of theistic mentation as utterly bereft of scientific methodology — on no evidence whatsoever? or because science has not confirmed what he has in mind? Either way…
Jess, am I “he”? I’m right over here; let’s be polite.
I don’t think I’m in retreat here, and in fact I’ll go back on the offensive. What do you mean by the “back end of theistic mentation”?
All I’m saying is what I’ve said all along: that the confidence scientists have in the inductions they make is based on an enormous body of data: observation of the world, experimental results, confirmed predictions, and so on, while religious faith (even to call such faith “induction” is generous, I think) is based on…?
“… the induction of religious faith, which is based, it appears, upon no objective data whatsoever, and is subject to no such checks and constraints.” By the “back end of theistic mentation” I meant the confirmatory part, the only thing the scientific method can do. Your above language about this was as inflammatory as my depersonification of you.
Jess, I wasn’t trying to be inflammatory. I was just pointing out what I think is a genuine and important difference between scientific induction and religious faith.
I’m still in the dark, as I imagine many readers are, about what you have in mind as “the back end of theistic mentation”. You say that it’s the “confirmatory part, the only thing the scientific method can do”. Can you clarify this? For example, in a scientific context, I might, having formed by induction a theoretical prediction regarding relative abundance of isotopes in stellar spectra, then confirm the theory by making actual measurements. What sort of example might you give us for what you are talking about in the context of religion? What’s the “confirmatory part”?
Likewise, you seem offended by my saying that religious “inductions” are based on no objective data, and are subject to no checks and constraints — but can you offer any examples to the contrary? This is exactly what Antony Flew was getting at in his paper, namely the question what, if anything, might conceivably falsify a religious hypothesis, such as “God loves us”, or “if you live a virtuous life you will be with God in Heaven after you die.”
Science deals in public, objective data about the world, builds provisional, falsifiable inductions from that concrete basis, then generates predictions based on those inductions, and subjects them to stringent tests. Religion does nothing of the sort. They are fundamentally different.
Malcolm – I agree that science is fundamentally different from religion, but I don’t think you’ve put your finger on what the (or even a) difference is (and for the present, I won’t try to fill that void myself).
Consider the summation you offer in the final paragraph of your last comment: “Science deals in public, objective data about the world, builds provisional, falsifiable inductions from that concrete basis, then generates predictions based on those inductions, and subjects them to stringent tests. Religion does nothing of the sort. They are fundamentally different.”
Well, consider how the Roman Church goes about “validating” claims of miracles, or of demonic possession. In these limited contexts at least, they do a fair job of instantiating precisely the image of science you have offered for our consideration. Focus here on the data and it’s manipulation. Don’t be distracted by the non-public, non-objective aspects of miracles and demons — since many entities populating bona fide scientific theories have similar limitations.
And please don’t infer that I’m saying belief in miracles and demons is scientifically sound. I’m not, and I won’t allow myself to be dressed up as a strawman (i.e., a scarecrow in need of a brain). What I am hoping you will infer instead, is that you’re looking in the wrong places for marks to distinguish science from religion.
Hi Bob,
I’ll have to look into specific cases of “validated” miracles before responding to that, but yes, to the extent that they are seriously investigating these phenomena, and taking care to consider non-miraculous accounts, they are on the right track. (And don’t worry, I won’t be trying to dress you up in straw.)
But a typical article of the sort of faith-based belief I’m talking about might be, as chosen by Flew: “God loves us”. How is that testable or falsifiable?
(By the way, I am traveling later today, so if I can’t hold up my end of this conversation for a bit, that’s why…)