A Digression: Faith in Science and Faith in Religion

 

In a “Comment” on a December 2nd posting, “Concern Over Scientist’s Support for Intelligent Design Surfaced Before Tenure Vote,” in the “News Blog” of the Chronicle of Higher Education, a respondent identified as Marci wrote, “But I can’t accept that science does not itself rely on many aspects of blind faith.”

 

This follows my having read a November 24th op-ed piece in the New York Times by Paul Davies, the celebrated “scientist-theologian,” entitled “Taking Science on Faith.” He begins the piece by saying:

 

SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

 

The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.

 

Then, after having discussed the need he sees to investigate and finally to explain the order of nature and the fundamental laws of physics, he says:

 

Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too.

 

After further discussion, he concludes his essay:

 

In other words, the [physical] laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.

 

But this is troubling, because it aids and abets those who, for quite ulterior motives, motives very different from those of Davies, want to denigrate scientific knowledge by putting it on the same epistemological footing as religion. It is also troubling because it based in is a deep equivocation, that of an identification of the faith on which science may be said to depend with the faith on which the orthodox religious, e.g., orthodox Christians, believe themselves to depend.

 

The former may be understood as the faith that scientists have in the judgments of fellow scientists, i.e., in the judgments of fellow humans. This faith is quite provisional; because humans are capable of error, their judgments are always subject either to non-belief if reason and evidence do not support them or to outright rejection if reason and evidence show them to be false. Or it may be understood, as Davies understands it, as the reliance by scientists upon “an unexplained set of physical laws” or, alternatively, an “[un]testable theory of the laws of the universe.”

 

In at least the critical cases, such as, for orthodox Christians, the Trinity, the faith that the believers take themselves to be ultimately relying upon is something quite different. This faith is understood as faith in God’s revelations. Because, they believe, God simply does not err, these critical “revelations” are subject neither to non-belief if reason and evidence do not support them nor to outright rejection, for, they hold, reason and evidence cannot show them to be false.

 

It is not only the case, for orthodox Christianity, that God is the ultimate source of the revelations that the believer accepts in faith. It is also that case that the gracious action of God within the believer, empowering the believer so that he or she is able to accept something in faith, is a necessary condition of a person’s having that faith. This is clear in the First Vatican Council’s definition of faith, as reported by John A. Hardon, S. J., in The Catholic Catechism (p. 35):

 

The Vatican Council said many things about faith, but notably that: Faith is an assent of the mind in co-operation with the will under the influence of grace and a free gift of God; the object or focus of faith is God’s revealed word, and once embraced, God will provide that the true faith will be retained firmly and faithfully and not denied or brought into positive doubt. [The italics are Hardon’s.]

 

That this is the view too of orthodox Protestant Christianity can be seen in, e.g., Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology. An Introduction (Second edition; Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), p. 440: “Even faith itself is a gift of God, rather than a human action.”

 

QED: the faith of the scientist is not the faith of the religious believer.