Scientists undertake their studies as if a real universe exists and that the measurements and observations they make have true significance, a strong relationship to, and a high correspondence to that world. Most science and engineering degree programs don’t require philosophy courses, and the majority of people in those professions don’t give much more thought to ontology (what it means to “be”) than people in any other profession. Many scientists subscribe to the "Shut up and calculate" school, which is a humorous way of suggesting that there is too much actual work to do to bother with metaphysical arguments regarding the ontological status of reality. But acceptance of an external reality is one of the implied beliefs tied up with how science is conducted. It is an assumption, and one that has been argued about for centuries.
Within the Philosophy of Science there are the opposing "realist" vs "anti-realist" perspectives. In philosophy of science, anti-realism refers to claims about the non-reality of "unobservable" or abstract entities such as sub-atomic particles, electrons, genes, or other objects too small to measure directly or detect with human senses. One prominent position in the philosophy of science is instrumentalism, which is a anti-realist/non-realist position. Instrumentalism is the pragmatic view that a scientific theory is a useful instrument for understanding the world. Instrumentalists evaluate theories or concepts by how effectively they explain and predict phenomena, as opposed to how accurately they describe objective reality. By this standard, it has been suggested, the Ptolemaic solar system and the Copernican solar systems were equally good (up to a point). In my opinion, Instrumentalists have voluntarily donned blinders so they can focus on their work, rather than adopted a complete philosophical framework for reality. Non-realism takes a purely agnostic view towards the existence of unobservable entities: unobservable entity X serves simply as an instrument to aid in the success of theory Y. We need not determine the existence or non-existence of X. Some scientific anti-realists argue further, however, and deny that unobservables exist.
Some theories in physics are acknowledged to be technically untrue (the Ideal Gas Law, Newtonian mechanics) in that they don't actually refer to entities that really exist. The Ideal Gas Law posits a continuous fluid, whereas gas is actually a collection of very tiny particles that can be modeled as a fluid. The same sort of thing is the case for Newtonian physics which works well enough at sizes and speeds that humans typically encounter. But neither actually refers to physical things, so in a sense, they are anti-realist, or at least they don't attempt to mirror reality.
It’s hard to imagine how anyone could question reality’s existence, which is close to questioning existence itself. But they are out there: solipsists who doubt all existence, and even doubt that minds other than their own exist, Idealists, some mystical eastern religions, and adherents to fringe pseudo-religions like the “Course In Miracles” who at least agree that we all have minds, but that the physical world might be an illusion. One could wisecrack that this tendency to deny reality might have been bred out of the human race over time if there were a genetic component to such beliefs - that they would have stepped off the curb in front of a car (or chariot, or saber toothed tiger). But I imagine that even these people look both ways before crossing the street. Samuel Johnson was said to have responded to Berkeley’s theory that the universe exists only in our perceptions with, “I refute him thus!" and kicked hard at a stone.
This section explores a few of the better known and more influential approaches to this question, especially those that bear directly on the central question of this paper - “is Science based on faith?” Although I was tempted to present a full survey of competing theories of reality and man’s experience of it, the main emphasis of this section will be to distinguish those that deny an external reality (or deny our ability to experience it directly) and those that propose that we can have direct interaction and experience with the external universe. Some fairly big names of weighed in on both sides of this issue. The remainder of this section will lay out their cases.
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