Much has been written about the questions underlying both everyday experience and the more formal process of how we gain knowledge through scientific and empirical investigation. We take for granted so much of how we interact with the world that when we lay open the assumptions we must make regarding that world they seem excessive, sometimes even ridiculous. This section deals with some philosophical questions that directly relate to the question of scientific faith. They are questions dealing with Reality, with inference and induction, and with the uniformity and universality of nature.
The theories regarding how much we can trust our experience to teach us about the real world boil down into two major types: some form of common sense acceptance that there is a real world worth learning about vs. a variety of complex and tortured semantic, linguistic, and logical or sophist-tinged abstractions that question common sense experience and frequently strain the imagination. Most of us just take for granted that our experiences mean something and can be taken at face value instead of being some devious trick that is being played on us or a lifelong hallucination. To put it in the context of this paper, belief in reality is one of the major elements of the “faith” that underlies science.
The attackers of science don’t typically question assumptions that science makes about the fundamental nature of the external world. These people generally agree that we exist as parts of a greater universe that has an existence apart from us. But this point has actually been much debated over the years. Science does begin with some first principles about the nature of reality, and they are worth exploring in this section to determine if they are based on faith or are founded on something more substantial.
We also explore an equally controversial issue: assuming we can accept that there is a reality “out there”, can we use our experience in it to make predictions about future events? In other words, can we legitimately use induction to infer general rules from our specific and limited experiences?
To answer that question, we must also look at the predictability and universality of the “laws of nature”. Is there a basic uniformity of cause and effect across time and space? Will the future resemble the past? Did the past look like the present? Are the phenomena we see here of the same type we see across the expanse of the universe? Is Hume’s assertion, “From causes which seem similar we expect similar effects” valid? If we can’t answer “yes” to these questions, how can we conclude that events tomorrow, or even 10 seconds from now will have some relation to what has just happened? How can we be confident that the sun, which has risen billions of times, will rise tomorrow one more time?
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