A very nice post from Rob Knop, exploring the the role of faith in science:
You may then ask, am I not then taking many of the results of science as faith, since I didn’t check all of the experimental results and subsequent analysis myself? Answer: yes and no. It is a lowercase-f “faith”, in that I trust the scientists who did the work to have known what they were doing and to have honestly and reasonably done the work. I have also trusted the others in their sub-field to keep them honest, by reproducing the experiments independently and critically reading their work. This is very, very different from the big-F “Faith” on which religion is based.
There’s not a great deal to say, other than “Amen, brother.”
And what’s interesting is that the two are mutually inverse – the less Faith you have to have in a scientist’s work being correct (for example, if they show you how to reproduce the experiment), the more faith you can have in it.
Nice observation, Corkscrew!
Another difference between “faith” and “Faith”. Suppose it is proved your faith was misplaced (e.g. the scientists fudged the data). Disappointing, to be sure, but it’s not the end of your worldview.
How Faith hold up under similar circumstances?
Still, if you do not share the experience of the methods the scientist use, you are near big “Faith” than small “faith”. Because of this it is important to drive young students into science lab experiences, not just lecturing, and because of this modern Science Museums are concentrated in activity more than in display.
I’ve made the “science is a belief system” argument more than a few times, partly because it’s fun to watch people get all pinched up about it – the belief system of many scientists seems to include the notion that science isn’t a belief system. Everyone operates from a belief system, and I think the belief system each of us chooses has more to say about the way we were raised than about how effective that system is in explaining the world around us. I’m not so swayed by Knop’s big-F/little-F dichotomy, in my experience everybody sees his own belief system as the superior one and humans have wrangled about the merits of belief systems for millenia without resolving the question. Like Knop, I too “…believe in the progress of science because the progress, the concrete results in the explanation of natural phenomena, has shown that it works.” In the long run, it’s going to be the practical fact that science produces better results than competing belief systems that will eventually win out. But it takes generations to change attitudes across entire cultures – check back in a few hundred years to see how it’s going 😉