Draft of Saturday, July 11, 2009 2:02 PM for comments only

Is Science Based on Faith?

Victor J. Stenger

For Reality Check in Skeptical Briefs Vol. 19, No. 3 September 2009.

Christian apologists argue that evidence in religion is no less credible than evidence in science. As David Marshall asserts:

Almost everything we know—not just about first-century Palestine, but about dwarf stars, neutrinos, state capitals, vitamins, and sports scores—we believe because we find the person telling us the information is credible.

Yes, but the stories of the Bible are incredible. Isn’t it incredible that someone born of a virgin rose from the dead? To believe that requires far more evidence than a ball score in the newspaper. And, as someone who labored for thirty years to learn the properties of neutrinos, I can tell you that the evidence for their existence far exceeds any evidence that someone rose from the dead.

Marshall continues the same line of argument: "The second level of faith is trust in our senses. . . . Again there’s no way to prove your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin are giving you the real scoop about the outside world."

True, we can’t prove our senses are giving us the “real scoop.” But we have plenty of personal experience that our senses do a good job of alerting us to oncoming cars, warning us when something on the stove has caught fire, and telling us that the baby needs to be fed.

Marshall turns to testimonial evidence:

Third, to learn anything we accept ”testimonial evidence” from parents, teachers, books, street signs, Wikipedia, and “familiar” voices transmitted as electronic pulses over miles of wire and electromagnetic signals, then decoded into waves in the air. Almost everything we know comes from other people one way or another. This is true in science.

Yes, but we don’t just take anyone’s word for it. We test against independent observations. If I went up to a colleague and told him I solved some major physics problem, do you think he would simply accept that without insisting I prove it to him?

Of course we don’t have time to independently test everything we hear, so we take the word of credible people. But that’s because these people have already demonstrated their credibility by proving to be reliable in the past. That’s why scientists and scholars of all kinds work so hard to maintain a good reputation. No one pays attention anymore to Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, the chemists who announced to the world in 1989 that they had discovered cold fusion.

It also depends on what is the message. If an airline pilot flying over Yellowstone National Park reports seeing a forest fire, we have no reason to doubt her. But if she reports seeing a flying saucer whose pilot waved a green tentacle at her, I would demand more evidence.

Besides, much testimonial evidence is highly unreliable, as demonstrated by the hundreds of death row inmates who were convicted by eyewitness testimony and later exonerated by DNA evidence in recent decades. Physical evidence is what matters the most.

Theologian John Haught agrees with Marshall: “Unacknowledged declarations of faith underlie every claim the atheist makes as well, including the repudiation of faith.” He refers to the statement made in the 1960s by the eminent biochemist and atheist Jacques Monod that it is unethical to accept any ideas that fail to adhere to the “postulate of objectivity.” Haught asks, “what about the precept itself? Can anyone prove objectively that the postulate of objectivity is true?^”

The validity of the postulate of objectivity is not to be proven by some philosophical, deductive argument. Its validity is proved beyond a reasonable doubt by the empirical evidence of its methodological success.

Haught counters,

There is no way, without circular thinking, to set up a scientific experiment to demonstrate that every true proposition must be based on empirical evidence rather than faith. . . . The claim that truth can be attained only by reason and science functioning independently of any faith is itself a faith claim.

On the contrary, every successful scientific experiment that results in a practical application demonstrates the utility of basing our theories on empirical evidence. Whether or not it is “true” in some metaphysical sense is irrelevant, as long as it works.

Haught uses the same line of argument to claim that atheists have an unjustified faith that the real world is rational. What’s the alternative, an irrational world? It’s not the world that is or isn’t rational. It’s human beings. Being rational just means that when you talk about some subject, the words you use are well defined and the statements you make are self-consistent. How can irrational thinking with ill-defined words and inconsistent statements lead us to any credible knowledge?

The disagreement here rests on the different way scientists and intellectual theists view the world. To a scientist, calling the world “rational” or “irrational” makes no sense. It’s like calling the world “hungry” or “angry.” These are human mental states. Theists, on the other hand, hold to a concept of reason that is more platonic, more personal, more akin to a mystical light that suffuses the universe. In this they adhere to a more archaic idea of reason, or at least one that has not advanced along with the advance of science.

Science makes no assumption about the real world being “rational.” It simply applies rational methods in taking and analyzing data, following certain rules to assure that data are as free from error as possible, and checking the logic of our models to make sure they are self-consistent. The only alternative is irrationality—error-filled data and inconsistent models.

Physicist, prolific author, and Templeton Prize winner Paul Davies caused quite a stir among his fellow scientists when he wrote in an op-ed piece for the New York Times in 2007, “Science has its own faith-based belief system.” He explains, “All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way.”

This was greeted by many letters to the editor that pointed out, as I have, that our confidence in science is based on its practical success, not some logical deduction derived from dubious metaphysical assumptions.

We trust scientific method, logic, and mathematics because they work. They give us answers that we can independently test against objective observations. They give us electric lights, computers, and cell phones.

Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings.

Excerpted from Vic Stenger’s latest book: The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason (Prometheus Books 2009).

Is Science Based on Faith?

Further Reading