Equating science with faith

I note that Merriam Webster, which you seem to regard as having some authority, fails to give "logic" as a synonym for God in any of its definitions. Perhaps you ought to write to them, and correct them on this. While you're at it, you could also ask them to include "the law of contradiction" as one of their definitions of science.If you choose to argue that reality = God, and logic = God, then you could also advise them to include reality as a definition of logic, and logic in their definitions of reality, which I'm sure they've failed to do.I don't know if you've noticed, but there's another Christian on this thread defining his God sometimes as "energy" and sometimes as "existence". If he starts writing to dictionaries about this as well, they're going to have a real headache. A quick aside on your thesis about something that is sort of indirectly related to this thread's topic. If you're going to talk about Hume, and you want to sound authoritative, it would help if you put him in the correct century.Apart from that technical point, you also need to think about what a volume is, and what a statement is, and what an extract is. That's a clue as to the reason why you might want to remove the Hume section from your blog.

Science doesn't require faith, unless we use the word to describe the trust that everyone has to have in their senses and observed reality.Picture this:A small tribe of stone age people are living in a large cave, into which they have recently moved. They have a small problem, which is that they’ve noticed that some of their spears are becoming warped. The faith of the tribe is in animism and ancestor worship, and the shaman has declared that the source of the problem is that the men are not properly performing the ritual in which the spirits of the ancestors are asked to strengthen and guide the spears.One of the men, called Smartass, examines his warped spear, and notices that it is damp. As one of the areas in which the spears are stored is in a place where water trickles in through the roof of the cave, he’s not surprised, and wonders whether the water and the warping might have a connexion, as his remaining straight spears are dry.He decides to test the idea by leaving two of his spears in the damp area of the cave, and two others in a particularly dry area. Sure enough, after a couple of days, the spears in the damp area are showing signs of warping, and the dry ones are straight and true. Excited, he tells the rest of the tribe the results of his experiment, and advises them to store their spears in the driest possible areas of the cave.The shaman is not pleased, and challenges the result, firm in his faith that the ancestral spirits must be involved, and fearing loss of status in the tribe. Smartass once again places two spears in the damp area and two in the driest area, and after a couple of days, the results of his experiment are repeated, and the tribe are convinced that his hypothesis is now a strong theory.Common sense on the part of Smartass, but also stone age science. No faith required.The story can have two alternative endings:(1) The shaman murders Smartass, because his way of explaining things is a threat to the status quo.(2) Smartass gains an admiring following, becomes chief of the tribe, and they prosper under his pragmatic, realistic, materialistic guidance. None of this stops them from believing in the spirits of their ancestors.This kind of thing is the root of the scientific way of looking at our environment. There is no grand philosophy and no faith required. Methodological naturalism is really just a fancy name for a kind of practical common sense approach to understanding the world.We have a lot of space age shamans on this site who seem to think otherwise.One of our shamans, Rob, likes to quote this from physicist Paul Davies:

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“The worldview of a scientist, even the most atheistic scientist, is that essentially of Monotheism. It is a belief, which is accepted as an article of faith, that the universe is ordered in an intelligible way.

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Now, you couldn’t be a scientist if you didn’t believe these two things. If you didn’t think there was an underlying order in nature, you wouldn’t bother to do it, because there is nothing to be found. And if you didn’t believe it was intelligible, you’d give up because there is no point if human beings can’t come to understand it.
But scientists do, as a matter of faith, accept that the universe is ordered and at least partially intelligible to human beings. And that is what underpins the entire scientific enterprise. And that is a theological position. It is absolutely ”Theo’ when you look at history. It comes from a theological worldview.

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That doesn’t mean you have to buy into the religion, or buy into the theology, but it is very, very significant in historical terms; that that is where it comes from and that scientists today, unshakably retain that worldview, as an act of faith. You cannot prove it logically has to be the case, that the universe is rational and intelligible. It could easily have been otherwise. It could have been arbitrary, it could have been absurd, it could have been utterly beyond human comprehension. It’s not! And scientists just take this for granted for the most part, and I think it’s a really important point that needs to be made.”

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This shows us that there’s no reason to suppose that good physicists are good philosophers or historians! Common sense, as shown by Smartass, doesn’t require monotheism, polytheism, atheism or anything else. No-one needs to have faith that there is order in nature to do science. If the stone age tribe come to see it as a general rule that damp damages their spears, that is drawn from observation, experience, and in the case of the early scientist, Smartass, deliberate testing.So that's why animist ancestor worshippers, polytheists (someone should tell Davies about the Greeks :rolleyes monotheists, atheists and others can all do science.It is only those shamans who believe in superstitions that clash with the reality revealed by scientific method who have problems with it.These days, long past the stone age, we call them "creationists", the champions of blind, irrational faith.Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Added blank lines between paragraphs in quote box.

Why do you bother typing such phrases if you cannot know whether you know whether you know if they have meaning? How do you know? Indeed. How do you know I do? It's just your perception that it requires faith to study a maybe. Why do you keep treating that dog on your desk as a computer? Science relies only on one assumption: That there is an observable reality. It's the same assumption that you make when you treat your computer as a computer. If you use the word "faith" in that sense, it becomes fairly meaningless, because we have no choice in the matter. If you don't accept the reality you percieve, then you are just as likely to walk over the edge of a 400 foot cliff as to stop at the edge of it, and you could just as well eat shit as food, or drink arsenic as water. You would be dead very quickly.No rational thought process is required to make this assumption. Babies trust the apparent reality around them by instinct, and so do simple creatures like fish or worms. Science isn't using faith, unless you think a new born baby has to have faith that its mother exists.The assumption of science is one all people have to make, have been making since babyhood, and will make throughout their lives.Edited by bluegenes, : Changed title that was initially designed for a different post

Rob or ICANT? I agree, except that I wouldn't say that he's not quite right, but that he's entirely wrong. We don't have to have faith that the universe is ultimately ordered in order to do science. You can do what my cave man did without having any preconceptions about whether or not the universe is ultimately ordered.I think that Davies has got it exactly the wrong way round. We do science because of things we don't know, not because of things we have faith in.Honestly, I don't know if the universe is ultimately ordered, but it wouldn't stop me from doing science.Science can and has been done with views of the universe that we now know to be misconceptions. It was done in the context of a geocentric universe, and worked up to a point, then in a steady state universe, and so on.We don't even have to have an opinion on what the universe really is in order to do science. At a basic level, it's a common sense thing which appears to be natural to us.I could mention that 100 million non-monotheistic Japanese have no trouble doing more modern science than 1.5 billion monotheistic Muslims. Do we? We go on the working assumption that the laws will be the same tomorrow as today, but that's built from experience. Do we need to involve faith?We only need faith, IMO, if we use that word for the basic assumption of science, which is the same as the basic assumption of existence. We have to trust our observations, and assume that there's a reality of some sort, ultimately orderly or not.It's also odd to equate Gods with order, to my mind. In every theistic tradition that I can think of, they seem to do things at whim. Why should an omnipotent God be orderly, from our perspective? He can change the apparent laws of the universe whenever he wants to.Davies is misusing the phrase "monotheistic tradition". In tradition, Gods do random magic and miracles. They're messy, not orderly. He may want to be referring to a Deity who just lays laws down, then lets things roll, but how traditional is that?Think of my comment about the Japanese and the Muslim world, and then think of the greatest God in the Gaps phrase cop out explanation of them all: "It's God's/Allah's will". Don't you think that science sometimes seems to thrive in spit of monotheism, and certainly not because of it?Do you really think that EvC would exist if the "monotheistic tradition" underpinned, or inspired science?

Not really, and not in any of my dictionary's definitions. Yours would be a better definition for an act of faith.A concept is not an action. "Believing" and "knowing" aren't the same things. You need to express that more clearly. If you want to be a philosopher, you have to be very precise with language. When your meaning isn't very clear, it's difficult for others to discuss your points. You link to a post into which you've pasted some faith based superstitious waffle about about Divine authority being infallible. I'm not superstitious, and it doesn't make any point to me. It's your point that requires faith.Don't confuse the idea of you or I deciding to take something like the distance of the sun from the earth on trust as being the same as science taking it on trust. Scientists didn't sit back and trust the original measurement made by Captain Cook's team in the late eighteenth century. They've made the measurement time and time again since, and in different ways, before they regard it as a fact. Good science is, in a way, built on distrust.Science's view of that distance is based on repeated and repeatable observations and calculations. There is no faith involved unless, as I've said in posts above, we use the word faith in a meaningless way, to describe the assumption of science that there is some kind of observable reality. This isn't really faith, because it's the same as the assumption that you're making when you treat what's in front of you right now as a computer screen, not a dog.That doesn't come from faith, but from reacting to our environment in the way you've been doing since you were a baby. Methodological naturalism is just a common sense approach to understanding your environment, and if you check it out, you use it all the time, and your ancestors were using it long before the term was coined, and long before the English language existed.It's even arguable that other animals use it in a very basic way. Scientific method is a tool that works, which is why your computer works, and to do science requires no faith.Edited by bluegenes, : No reason given.

Scientists do not claim to know the origin of the universe. There is no faith required in saying "I don't know". Just honesty, a concept that's foreign to people with a blind faith in any of the ancient creation myths.

You need to learn the difference between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism. The former is is a way of examining the natural world, the latter is the belief that the natural world is all there is (what you call materialism). Atheists are people who don't believe in any Gods. Atheism is the lack of faith in Gods. Atheists do not have to be metaphysical naturalists. They might believe in the human soul as a non-material entity, for example. Buddhists and Animists may or may not believe in any Gods, but believe in a soul that transcends death. An atheist could believe in ghosts.This all seems to be very confusing to the minds of biblical creationists, but it's actually quite simple. You seem to live in an unreal world in which the only possible God is yours. There's nothing to stop a God (or Gods, or Goddesses) creating universes in which things like biological evolution happen. If you disagree, do feel free to explain to us why an omnipotent God couldn't create a universe in which biological evolution could (or would, by intent) take place.Looking at the the topic title, "Equating science with faith", you seem to want to equate methodological naturalism with philosophical naturalism. Why?

I don't know if it's your use of the word faith here, or your use of the word truth, or both, but could you explain this?On this thread, the word faith is really being used to mean the acceptance of things as being true without evidence. The question being, does science do this in the way that religions do? As for truth, I'm thinking of the common modern usage. Something like "in keeping with the facts".That's why I want to question your view that faith is a system for finding truth.Firstly, which of the following best fits your use of the word "truth" when you're claiming that faith is a system for finding truth. (I don't even see it as a system, but leave that for the moment).Truth Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com1. the true or actual state of a matter: He tried to find out the truth.
2. conformity with fact or reality; verity: the truth of a statement.
3. a verified or indisputable fact, proposition, principle, or the like: mathematical truths.
4. the state or character of being true.
5. actuality or actual existence.
6. an obvious or accepted fact; truism; platitude.
7. honesty; integrity; truthfulness.
8. (often initial capital letter) ideal or fundamental reality apart from and transcending perceived experience: the basic truths of life.
9. agreement with a standard or original.
10. accuracy, as of position or adjustment.
11. Archaic. fidelity or constancy.I ask this because I think the opposite. That faith, as in religious faith, has nothing to do with finding out "truths", but rather, it is consistently used to avoid doing so, and to prevent others from doing so.So, either we're using the words faith and truth (or one of them) in very different ways, or we're in complete disagreement.

I do want to take argument. Faith is not "a system for finding truth". If Joe has faith in the Sun God, he has not found the truth of the Sun God. If you're implying that Joe would have discovered a "truth" in his own subjective "reality", then I think that your use of the words truth and reality are pointless. I don't see how faith can be a tool for finding truth, but it's certainly a very effective tool for obscuring truth, as we see here on EvC every day!I think that you're maybe obscuring the fairly straightforward subject of the thread by using words in unusual ways. The question is, does science require faith in the same way that Joe's evidenceless belief in the Sun God does.I say that the answer's a simple "no".

I don't think that's a good description of what we are discussing. The thread is a reaction to the "my faith is as good as yours" attitude often expressed by religious critics of science. So, defenders of science point out that it is based on evidence and observation, not faith. We "bother" because science is under constant attack from some types of religion, in case you've been too busy philosophising to notice. Science is not a system of belief. It is a practical tool or method of finding things out, and the body of knowledge gained from that method. If "why" is important to you, it's difficult to see how the relation to reality of the beliefs could have no importance, but I'm happy to take your word for this. That's not my argument. Joe's belief in the Sun God is a reality. That was in relation to your statement that faith is a system of finding truth. Joe hasn't found truth via his faith in the Sun God.People's beliefs being important, and having an interest in people's beliefs was not what I said was pointless, was it? I'm very interested in people's beliefs and why they have them, and, unlike you, how they relate to reality. See above. We appear to be talking at cross purposes. Here's a suggestion for you. If we have beliefs, like Joe's, based on faith rather than evidence, and those beliefs are often held so strongly that people will, as you say, kill or die for them, then isn't an enormous amount of conflict in humanity inevitable? Because the claimed "truths" are not based on evidence, then we inevitably have a lot of conflicting "truths".That's why I picked up on your "faith is a system for finding truths" phrase. Like you, I'm very interested in what people believe and why, but I'm also very interested in pressuring the world to respect evidence as the basis for their views of the universe, not blind and divisive faiths.Edited by bluegenes, : extra word deleted

And there was silly me, thinking that we were speaking modern English on this website, when all the time we should be writing in ancient Greek! Evolution can certainly be observed and studied in a lab, and creation cannot. Perhaps you meant "speciation" (which can occasionally be observed) or "common descent" rather than evolution. The theory of evolution is definitely scientific. It is based on observation, evidence, and the confirmation of some of its predictions. None of the many (contradicting) creation mythologies are scientific.

If you were to observe Macro-evolution in real time, it would look like Micro-evolution. They're one and the same thing. Just as the small scale continental drift that can be observed in real time is the same thing as continents moving hundreds of miles over millions of years.Finding out about the Earth's history is done by present day observations. In exactly the same way as we examine a murder for which there are no witnesses (except the murderer) in order to find out how it was done and by whom, the past can and is being discovered.This seems to upset superstitious people who cling to ancient mythologies about the Earth's history, but if you really were "antiLIE", you wouldn't be one of these. So is Macro-evolution, in the way explained above, and because speciation can be directly observed. I have yet to see any evidence for any of them. The fact that there are so many, from so many different cultures, is definitely evidence of a human tendency to make things up.As for ancient documentation, the story of King Arthur may be documented, but that doesn't mean that a King with a magic sword really existed. So the next time that you read about Hercules being a demi-God, or whatever myths your religion involves, take it with a pinch of salt.I think you're probably trying to equate your faith (and desires) with historical science by claiming that neither are science, so I suppose we're on topic.

Good. That means you don't have a religion, then. You can examine the evidence for large scale historical evolution without bias. And if you do that, you'll realise that what modern biologists think is very much science.You claim the opposite in a post above, which means that you can't have looked at the evidence yet.

You, sir, are the one with limited understanding of language. "Appearance" implies neither sudden nor gradual coming into view, but can mean either. So, what else other than sudden? Gradual.You won't find a definition of the word with a time limit on it.

I haven't looked at all the ways you've used the word, but I do remember you claiming that Macroevolution can't be observed. By the TalkOrigins definition you've given, it can be directly observed, and it can certainly be indirectly observed.In relation to the topic of this thread, are you trying to argue (or hint) that belief in macroevolution is based on faith, rather than observation and evidence, or have I got it wrong?