Science and Faith: Enemies

God created the Scientists. So if your child is ill and you need to see a doctor, pls do so. If however, you are a believer of divine healing, by all means, it's there for you and it is free. There is no charge for God's divine healing. However, divine healing is by faith. If your faith is not strong enough, seek urgent medical attention. That is why God gave the doctors brain!!!!!!

Your entry greatly overstates the disparity between scientific "proof" and religious "belief". For example, if you examine the theory of evolution, I think that you would quickly realize that much of this theory is based on the same "faith" to which you are so diametrically opposed. For instance, an individual that believes in the theory of evolution will necessarily believe that the origin of life is the result of a cosmic collision. This "scientific" belief actually opposes one of the most rigorously proved laws of chemistry and physics, which essentially states that entropy increases over time. If we take this scientific assertion to be true, how is it that a "big bang," which optimizes entropy would eventually result in the transformation of randomized particles (high entropy) to intricately ordered humans (low entropy). Such an argument is tantamount to saying that one could go to a junkyard in the morning, leave the junkyard and come back five minutes later to find a fully assembled and functional Boeing 747. It is a non-sequitur. Thus, a belief in evolution necessarily requires a certain "faith" that the results of the second law of thermodynamics and those of evolution can effectively coexist with one another despite being contradictory. There are multidinous examples in science of the need for "faith," however, I shall wait for your rebuttal before proceeding further.

Why do we need faith at all? Why can't we just use reason all the time? And I don't think that forming hypotheses counts as "faith."

Deep Thought,

You know, Marxists consider their advocacy of legalized theft to be economic justice. Similarly, a certain psychotic considered the neighbor's dog's "commandments" to shoot strangers to be the word of Satan himself.

Objectivists are well aware of the fact that people, all over the world and in thousands of instances, choose to call one thing another thing; but that doesn't change anything.

If faith means "developing and using reason", then what does reason mean? How are the two distinguished?

There is simply no evidence for the existence of God. Thus, an "reasoning" about God is not reasoning at all. Instead, it is rationalizing. It is taking an initial, arbitrary, made up premise and then building a whole corpus of meaningless derivative concepts around it.

One cannot understand something which does not exist.

You know, the Catholic Church does not define 'faith' as 'belief without evidence'. Nor do the Orthodox, nor the Jew, nor the Muslim. Indeed, the millenia long traditions of Catholics (including St. Thomas Aquinas, whom Rand considered one of the top 3 philosophers of all time) and and Jews (with such thinkers as RamBam) are all about developing and using reason as a tool to understand God.

This entire idea of 'faith means belief without evidence' is VERY recent and not held by the religious. I call it the Douglas Adams definition because it became current from Hitchhiker's Guide - where he was actually mocking the concept of scientism.

I must protest one of the arguments made by Sean in these comments.

First of all, research dollars are not mostly spent on "shots in the dark." Whether privately funded or publically funded (and today I am not arguing the morality of the latter, though it could be argued), a research proposal for funding takes many months of work. The hypothesis/hypotheses must be clearly stated and the aims must be disclosed up front. One chapter of such a proposal is essentially a review of the literature on the subject under investigation to demostrate the viability of the project, and the arguments for the hypothesis/hypotheses must be backed up with evidence. Perhaps Sean is confused by the vulgar use of the word "hypothesis" to mean "educated guess." Rather, scientists think of hypothesis as a statement that can be demonstrated (or not) by observation of physical reality. This is why it is stated matter-of-factly rather than with qualifiers. In such case, it is indeed true that whether the hypothesis is demonstrated or not, knowledge is gained.
However, 'fishing expeditions' as "shots in the dark" are known to scientists, are not looked upon with respect in the scientific world.

With respect to the main point of the article, that faith is incompatible with scientific thinking, this is true when one defines faith as the acceptance of propositions untestable by reality. In science, one may not appeal to faith any point in an investigation. The very definition of science does not allow it. Science, defined simply, is the study of the physical universe using the scientific method.

There are many working scientists who accept or at least practice religion, however, they cannot bring an assumption based on faith into their scientific work.

Generating a scientific hypothesis is not the same as having faith. A hypothesis is accepted only when evidence in reality supports it. Faith entails just the opposite approach; it demands belief without evidence and in contradiction to the evidence.

To illustrate, consider the scientist who hypothesizes that infected animals stop responding to a particular medication because the pathogen develops resistance towards the antibiotic. If the scientist then simply believes his theory, he would be acting on faith, without any evidence to support his claim. If, however, the scientist conducts a systematic experimentation of his hypothesis and then proceeds to accept his theory, his claim would be supported by evidence. A scientific hypothesis is a part of the fact-based process of arriving at truth. It is a means to achieving evidence-based knowledge. Faith is the attempt to achieve exactly the opposite.

Furthermore, a scientist does not take “shots in the dark.” A proper scientific hypothesis is itself based on some evidence suggesting its truth. The hypothesis is formed by first studying our surroundings and then logically proposing an explanation. It is not a random guess, based on whims or feelings.

Sean,

You're playing a semantical game. If you wish to label intuition or confidence or suspicion as "faith" that's fine, but it doesn't change the fact that the author was using the word to refer to something specific. Something which exists - as a conciously held conviction - inside the minds of many people.

Yes, of course the parents of the teenage girl were irrational - but it was not because they honestly believed that by doing nothing they were "experimenting" with a plausible cure. Irrationality is not the same things as making a mistake. Instead, they were conciously, deliberately doing nothing because they conciously believe that evidence - even suggestive evidence - is not a requirement for making one's choices. They were not simply mistaken about this notion. They were willfully commited to it as if they knew it to be true.

I'm sure when she died, their conclusion was not "we made a mistake." Instead, it was "her death was God's will."

I just wrote a really long response to this, and it got deleted because I forgot to answer the arithmetic problem. So faith didn't fail me this time, computer science did.

Thanks, crappy spam protection feature.

I'll try to summarize my mind bending response to the Ritu's essay:

Faith is more often applied intuition when science is unobservable or misunderstood, rather than belief in the active beneficence of an intellectual, higher power, as in the case of the girl afflicted with pneumonia outlined by the author. The example is unfairly extreme. The parents did not rely on faith because they were deeply religious but because they were irrational. Furthermore, medicine in the absence of faith and shared prayer is often less effectual than than the two combined.

Working in research for several years as I have, I know that scientists proceed with faith all the time. Documenting or publishing based on faith would be stupid, of course, but experiments and hypotheses are quite often devised based on faith, particularly in experimental and emerging sciences. While no one would spend money without some scientific notion of an outcome, most research money is spent on shots in the dark, on discovering what DOESN'T work rather than what does.

While I don't completely disagree with the author, I do think she should be intellectually honest enough to admit that faith and science are not really mutually exclusive, or that faith does have an important place in human endeavor.

My summary is not so hot. Ah, well. Dig the new blog format, UC.