2 The accusations

For years I considered my interest in the axioms underlying science to be an interesting hobby that had no real importance, just an indulgence – a dabbling in epistemology, positivism and pragmatism. But more recently numerous organizations and individuals have come out with attacks on these premises by trying to demolish their significance and relevance. One need only briefly search the internet, or visit the sites of any of several fundamentalist “think tanks” and “research institutes” such as the Discovery Institute or Answers in Genesis to discover that the ranks of the anti-science and anti-reason factions are numerous and vocal. Several examples:

• A September 28, 2008 article in Wired magazine questioned if science is becoming a religion (Artist Builds Temple of Science)
  


• H.M. Morris in “Scientific Creationism” (1985) asserted that Evolution requires a much faith as science and that science is becoming a religion because it encompasses views of values and ultimate meanings.
  


• Warren Chisum, a member of the Texas House of Representatives, published a memo to all members of the Texas House of Representatives saying, “Indisputable evidence - long hidden but now available to everyone – demonstrates conclusively that so-called ‘secular evolution science’ is the Big-Bang 15-billion-year alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion. This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic ‘holy book’ Kabbala dating back at least two millennia.”
  


• In “What's wrong with science as religion” – Salon.com July 31, 2008, Karl Giberson writes, “Impressive scientific progress has spawned these new preachers in the centuries since crowds sat spellbound under the judgmental voice of Edwards. Like their traditional counterpart, the new preachers speak with great confidence that their religion -- science -- contains all the truth we need to know and all the truth that can be known. They call us to worship at the altar of science, a summons of which I am skeptical, to say the least.
  


• Jonathan Barlow in “A Reformed Response To: Is Science a Religion?” says, “Confidence in the law of non-contradiction could be said to be faith. There is no direct way to prove the law of contradiction except that it must be presupposed in order to learn anything or differentiate anything from anything else. Likewise, the principle of induction, which states that the future will be generally like the past, is what makes possible the formulation of scientific laws and theories. We cannot test the truth of this principle scientifically, for we would be assuming the truth of induction to try and prove it.”
  


• In “Intelligent Design Revisited” (2005), David Limbaugh writes, “isn't the Darwinists' presupposition that life began without design unscientific? At the very least it requires as much faith as ID could conceivably require.”
  


• From “Delusions of Scientific Adequacy” (Aug 22, 2008), Dan Peterson writes, “But which requires more faith: the conclusion that the design evident in our universe (the only one we know to exist) is actually the product of a designer. Or the assumption that there must be a gigantic, unseen, universe-generating machine, with a colossal number of universes completely unlike our own bubbling into being, and that we just happened to win the lottery against stupendous odds?”
  


• In “The Devil's Delusion”, Princeton PhD, David Berlinski pillories the intelligentsia's new-found faith in atheistic scientism as shallow and exclusionary. "Like any militant church," he says, "this one places a familiar demand before all others: Thou shall not have any other gods before me."
  


• “Everyone, scientist or not, must start their quests for knowledge with some unprovable axiom—some a priori belief on which they sort through experience and deduce other truths. This starting point, whatever it is, can only be accepted by faith; eventually, in each belief system, there must be some unprovable, presupposed foundation for reasoning (since an infinite regression is impossible).” From http://www.answersingenesis.org.
  


• Richard Dawkins wrote in "Is Science a Religion", “I find it ironic that, whenever I lecture publicly, there always seems to be someone who comes forward and says, ‘Of course, your science is just a religion like ours. Fundamentally, science just comes down to faith, doesn't it?’”
  


• In her anti-science, anti-liberalism book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, Ann Coulter assaults evolution by arguing that evolutionary biology is a false and godless religion with Darwin as its prophet and the school teachers as its priests: “Liberals love to boast that they are not 'religious,' which is what one would expect to hear from the state-sanctioned religion. Of course liberalism is a religion. It has its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints, its own total worldview, and its own explanation of the existence of the universe. In other words, liberalism contains all the attributes of what is generally known as 'religion.'" She is referring, of course, to scientific explanations for cosmology, empiricism, external reality, induction, etc.
  


• Louisiana, Texas, Kansas, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and several other states have all recently battled or are currently battling anti-evolution, pro-Creationism factions bent on diluting and redefining the teaching of science in the public schools. These conflicts have taken the form of so-called “Academic Freedom” Laws, calls to ban the teaching of Evolution or Cosmology, and attempts to loosen the definition of Science to such a degree that astrology and religion could qualify as legitimate science class content. This is an ongoing struggle in which the pro-science side has recently been scoring significant victories. But the attacks keep coming.
  


• From “Feedback: Is Any Scientific Research Free from Presuppositions?” by Dr. Georgia Purdom, AnswersInGenesis, July 11, 2008: “Snelling, however, stated that all scientists have certain beliefs that are reflected in their data interpretation. ‘Every scientist has to make assumptions or has beliefs about how the evidence all fits together … If it’s legitimate for [evolutionary biologists] to have their belief system on which they base their science, it’s just as legitimate for a Christian to have the Bible as their belief system for which they base their science.”
  


• “Like Religion, Science Is Grounded in Non-Provable Beliefs”, by Nicanor Austriaco, Jr. “Most people would agree that religious faith is grounded in truths that cannot be demonstrated empirically using the scientific method. For the Catholic, these beliefs of faith are justified because they are accepted as true on the revelation and authority of God, who can neither deceive nor be deceived. What is not obvious is that scientific knowledge too must be grounded in essential, non-provable beliefs about the nature of the universe.” He goes on to give several examples that illustrate science’s unprovable reliance on parsimony and Ockham’s razor.
  


• “Science is the atheists' religion for the modern world, like Christianity or Islam, except that it is more superstitious and less refined. Atheists' belief in science requires faith like religion, but atheists don't recognize and accept its reliance on faith.” - //atheism.about.com/od/atheismscienceevolution/a/ScienceFaith.htm
  


• “Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.” – Dr. Paul Davies, "Taking Science on Faith," New York Times, Nov. 24, 2007
  

These mischaracterizations of science deserve a rebuttal, which is what the remainder of this paper attempts to provide.

1 The questions

Science studies the physical universe – observing, measuring, categorizing, experimenting, and theorizing about whatever is in or has an affect on that universe. I have always had an interest in ideas concerning the assumptions that one must adopt that make science possible and meaningful. Scientists and philosophers have debated what assumptions underlie science and provide the framework that allows us to take it seriously. Irrespective of the pleasant and convenient fact that it works very well at explaining our world, some valid questions can be asked:

• What justifies our confidence in science as a methodology and approach to understanding the world?


• Is science ultimately based on pure faith or on something more substantial?


• Is science itself just a new modern religion?

Many thoughtful people have approached these questions from different religious and philosophical positions. Those from a particular viewpoint - the anti-scientific, sometimes fundamentalist, post-modernist, or mystical camps - frequently denigrate the underlying postulates of science as being just as unprovable as faith in an all-powerful creator or other unprovable explanatory concept. I see this transparent attack as an attempt to put science in the position of “a pot calling the kettle black”. If these aspersions could be made to stick, then by what right would so-called “irreligious science” advocates have to accuse the religious or mystical of blind faith when they are just as guilty of resting on the same foundation?

These issues are not being debated in science circles. Most scientists are generally not also metaphysicians. They have as little need of it as plumbers or dentists. They can do their job independent of the answers to these questions because science is primarily a methodology rather than a philosophy. It is possible to be a good scientist while having either no opinion of, or even unusual opinions of the underlying philosophy. The accusations of groups like the Discovery Institute, Answers in Genesis, right-wing pundits, new age advocates, post-modernists, alternative medicine proponents, and others go mostly unnoticed by those actually contributing to the advance of knowledge. But the mischaracterizations and semantic sleight of hand from these groups are damaging to the public understanding of science and to the overall intelligence of our society. They deserve a response.

This paper will explore the “faith” that underlies science – or better expressed, the first principles that are either implicitly or explicitly accepted in its practice. These involve belief in the existence of a real world, belief that humans can experience that world, and the belief that they can draw valid conclusions from those experiences. It will examine the approaches that well-known and influential writers have taken to addressing some problems related to the concept of faith/belief in science:

• What is faith?


• How does faith differ from rational belief?


• What is reality?


• Can humans have meaningful experiences of reality?


• Can we draw inferences and conclusions based on our experience?


• What are the basic, underlying assumptions of science?


• On what basis can we have confidence in these assumptions?


• Is nature uniform and predictable?


• What values does science embrace?


• Why is science not a religion?

I’m not a scientist, but an avid science supporter. I sit on the sidelines and cheer on the various contributors. Having had a long interest in the philosophy of science, I hope to help clarify the confusion generated when adherents of many anti-reason, anti-science faiths make the false equivalence between their faith and the assumptions which underpin the scientific process.

Note: The following text borrows heavily from a number of sources, which I list in the references. With apologies, actual footnotes are not included in the body of the text. When in doubt, you may assume I have borrowed ideas and phrases from other sources, though I attempted in all cases to express ideas formulated by others in my own words. I don’t claim to have originated the all of the concepts outlined here, but only to have presented them in my own manner.

Hello

I'm John. As a home project and semi-obsession, I started working on a document outlining, for just myself, all the reasons why I thought that the "faith" (more appropriately called trust or belief) that people of reason have in how the world works is different than the faith that is tied up with religious, supernatural, new age, and other non-rational beliefs.

Since college many years ago, I have been running into people off and on who would try to equate the two, claiming that science was the "new religion of the 21st century", or that as traditional religion faded (I didn't know it was fading!) that a new technological/scientific religion would or should take its place. I don't see it that way. For starters, I'm not sure that superstition and other non-rational belief systems are fading at all. At best, we occasionally trade one form of irrationality for another. Although church affiliation may possibly be declining, we begin yoga, take homeopathic cures, believe in ESP and the paranormal, watch TV shows about ghost-hunters, buy books about Angels, and keep a sharp eye out for miracles. Secondly, I don't see Science and rationality as being a follow-on act for religion in any way. Science won't be the new religion any more than Plumbing or Accountancy will be. It seemed like a complete non-sequitur to me.

Another motivator for this blog - during the first Viking landing on Mars back in 1976, I was enthusiastically expecting that life would be discovered (it wasn't). A devil's advocate friend fully expected we would find nothing alive, and we didn't, darn it, though I don't think that mission was equipped to detect it, anyways. He argued that we had no reason to believe that anything on Mars was the same as on Earth - that chemistry might be completely different. He challenged me to prove otherwise. I discovered I couldn't since we had never been there before - it actually might have been different. I had just assumed it would be roughly the same. He claimed that only my unjustifiable "faith" in science made me believe that!

That has really stuck with me and has bothered me ever since. It has served as one of several inspirations for me to put this together. It turns out that there is good reason to believe claims like "Chemistry on Mars is probably like chemistry on Earth" and other assertions of the same kind. That is one of the things I will be delving into in this blog.

Anyhow, my project got bigger and bigger, and I started bringing in more and more material. I went back through old notes I took from various philosophy books I had read. I gathered information from other books I had around the house, from science and skeptical blogs, and from various online references, encyclopedias and wikipedia style sites. I found mystical/spiritual/religious/deconstructist websites that contained the exact type of thing I was irritated by. So, I combined this information with ideas I already had and kept on writing. After a while I began to wonder how I could share what I was doing with others. At first, I decided to try to link to it from my facebook page, but that didn't seem really like what I wanted to do or how I wanted to do it (maybe I don't want my little niece to read this stuff, anyway). So, then the blog idea was suggested to me.

I will probably introduce my ideas and writings in installments - segments/chapters/sections and see how it evolves. Because of the way blogs unfold, the structure of what I am presenting is in reverse order - the initial thoughts and sections at the very bottom, and the conclusions, final thoughts, and all the most recent installments at the top. I guess that's just how blogs work - the beginning (which I type in first) comes at the very end, and the end (which I type in last) comes at the beginning! I hope this doesn't confuse anyone.

Anyhow, thanks for reading and commenting -

John