Science Takes Faith?
A post in the "How to convert an atheist to Christianity" series.
You need more faith to believe in science than Christianity.
This trope is used a lot by apologists to imply that science takes more faith than religion. By faith they mean things that just need to be believed because someone said you should believe in it.
This appears to turn the tables on the atheist, because atheists reject faith as a source of knowledge, and here is a statement implying that they scientist need it, and they are inconsistent in claiming otherwise. This argument does not work with atheists who understand the difference between science and a religion.
What is Faith
Let's be clear on the definition of Faith.
There is a secular meaning of faith being "high confidence." For example, one might say "I have faith that my car can make it to the city" when what one means is that due to past experience, one is quite confident that the car can make it all the way. Of course it might not, but faith expresses confidence in the liklihood. In this sense we have faith that science will eventually find more things that make life better in the future. This discussion is not about the secular meaning of confidence.
Religious faith is a very specific meaning:
Oxford Dictionary: "strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof."
Webster: "belief and trust in and loyalty to God; belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion; firm belief in something for which there is no proof; complete trust"
Dictonary.com: "belief that is not based on proof"
Bible: Hebrews 11:1 – "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."
Believers that holds up faith as a virtue in itself. Thomas for instance demanded evidence that Jesus had been on the cross, and so he is not as virtuous as someone who believes in Jesus without seeing the evidence. It is considered a greater thing, because it is harder to do. Believing in the good news that Jesus brings is hard enough, but believing in it without evidence is hard still, making the accomplishment of this belief a worthy accomplishment in itself.
The atheist will not see it this way. They see it as believing in something false, which is bad, but believing in something false without any evidence for it is even worse, not better. Understand that the only reason anyone would consider faith to be a virtue, is if you already believed the belief in the first place. Atheists are not in that club and will not understand that.
Proof of Science
Like many apologist tropes, there is a hint of truth to it. 450 years ago Descartes laid out the principles that later became known as science. He tried science, he got better results with science than without, and the method subsequently caught on. (Actually the core principles were set down by William of Ockham, a Christian Monk, about 300 years earlier, but Descartes usually gets the credit for spreading them significantly.)
Descartes central idea is: ignore your intuition. That is: ignore you inner feeling, ignore your preconceived notions, ignore your common knowledge. Insist instead that everything you claim to know must be demonstrated.
Do things fall down? Just because you have an intuition that they do, ignore that, and take a suitable object and drop it. Yes, things fall down. The main point is that nothing should be taken for granted. You must actually do the demonstration, and anyone else can do the same and find the same result.
Demonstration, not Claims
Even more than this, nobody should believe anyone's claims simply because they are claimed. Descartes may have demonstrated to himself that things fall down, but nobody should just believe him. Instead, the conclusion must be accompanied with evidence of what can be demonstrated in a way that can be reproduced if needed. If you are to question him, and say "I don't believe you" then Descartes will produce a paper with the exact instructions of what to do, and anyone can verify for themselves that things fall down. The peer review process was set up to help scientists make sure that their instructions and evidence supporting the conclusion is complete and accurate.
Science seems to work, and it has been tremendously successful in discovering important new principles about the world, but what actual proof is there that science is the correct way to learn about the world? Nobody has ever proved this. There could theoretically be better ways to learn about the world. There could in theory be a methodological problem with science that causes it to always get the wrong answer.
The philosopher of Science, Karl Popper, studied this quite deeply, and came up with some surprising results, but you need to be very very careful, because his results are easily misunderstood. He concluded that science can not be proven correct in being the best method for discovering true statements about the world.
The only thing you can do is prove a claim to be false. If someone claims that things fall up, I can then set up a demonstrations. Here is an object, I will let go of it, let's see if it falls up. The claim (theory if it made in a proper formal manner) is used to make a prediction. You then check to see if the prediction is true. If the prediction is false, then the entire theory is false or at least incomplete.
Science is Unproven
Never argue that since nothing in science is proven, that means that religion is on an equal footing.
One trick of the spologist is then to say that if you believe science works, then you have believe without proof, and that is faith.
Science does not work on proving things. Science proposes theories and then accepts the theory with the most evidence. A proof exists only in math or other abstract logical systems. Nothing in the real world can be proven because there could be some evidence that you don't know about.
Things can be proven false, and that is known as "falsifiability." Every scientific theory should be falsifiable in the sense that if we saw a particular thing in the real world it would mean that the therory is false. For example, if we found a rabbit fossil in a layer of rock that only contains Cambrian life, then we could show evolution to be false, because evolution predicts this should never happen. The fact that millions of fossils have been classified, and we have never found a rabbit in Cambrian rock is very strong evidence that evolution is true, but it is not proof.
Science doesn't need to be proven. Nothing we know about the world is proven. Science produces reliable predictions. The more reliable the prediction is, the better it is. Proof would be perfect, and science is never perfect, it is only the best there is. Someone could discover something tomorrow that changes our understanding of the world. Not by a lot, mind you. Existing theories have mountains of eveidence and that evidence is still there, but we might discover that some unexpected behavior in a place that has never been tested. Newton laid down the laws of motion; later Einstein discovered that there is a maximum speed that anything can go, causing us to rethink the laws of motion for things going extremely fast, must faster than Newton could ever have accomplished. It is not that Newton was wrong in the comain of everyday life, but that the theory needed modification when going nearly the speed of light.
Science is Faith
Never say an atheist must be using faith to believe in science. Science is based on practice of rigorously requiring evidence at every step, and rarely are there exceptions.
What matters is that science is based on demonstrating evidence for the theory. Faith is when you don't have evidence. Those are entirely different things. Science may not have proof, but it has evidence. Not only that, science is clearly accurate enough to enable people to accomplish remarkable things. Cell phones could not have been made without science. Flat screens could not be made without science. Man could not have gotten to the moon without science. Even automobile engines could not have been made without science. There is plenty of evidence that science works, and every atheist knows it.
The truthiness in this argument is that every single person has not run every single experiment, and therefor we are trusting that other scientists have not fooled us and said false things about the world. The argument above is foolish because anyone can demonstrate a TV working. There is no question that electronics companies truly have discovered how to make TVs work. Anyone who doubts this can be set at ease easily. The same is not true about heaven, no matter how much you believe it to be true.
In general it is very hard for a scientist to make bogus claims. The reason is because in order to be published, a scientist must demonstrate evidence for their claim in such a way that others could use the evidence to come to the same conclusion. No matter how much a scientist things that something is true, they can not get it published without evidence. Occasionally scientist do publish bogus things, and more commonly (yet still rare) the scientist publishes based on a mistake. The process does not end with publication. Later attempts to build on that result might find they can not reproduce the results when done exactly the same way. A small fraction of papers have to be retracted and removed from the effective literature.
This process makes it very hard to publish bogus things, and this is what makes science in general trustable. Again, trusting science is not faith, because the vast majority of papers are true. That vast majority is hard evidence that science is in general trustable. Not perfect, but highly reliable. The atheist is likely to think you a fool if you say that believing science takes faith.
Not Enough Faith
A real common trope is to combine this with incredulity and this is often used by creationists. Evolution is not intuitive at all. Common sense is based on things we see around us every day, and we just don't see evolution acting every day because it acts far too slow. So unless you have done careful research on the topic, and looked at the actual evidence, everyone has a hard time initially believing that evolution really can work.
This incredulity is leveraged in an emotional plea: evolution is so unbelievable they will use language that belittles people who accept it.
I don't have enough faith to believe in evolution!
It makes the audience feel they are part of a crowd, and it puts the biologists down in a clever way. This will work well in a creationist congregational setting because it makes everyone feel to be part of the group, and it reinforces intuitions. Yet, it will not work with the atheist. As mentioned above, proof is not needed, and when evidence is abounding, there is no faith needed at all. Science makes predictions and they are reliable, so no faith is needed.
If you are trying to persuade an atheist that Christianity is true, it is best to avoid a common trope that apologists use. Remember that an apologist is paid to speak to Christian audiences to reassure Christian audiences and not really to help Christians convert more atheists.
Technology Works because of Science
Here is a discussion I had once:
Q: I am not arguing that science is a hoax. Instead, you have faith in the process by which they make the TV work. They told you what the process was and you believe them.
If religion was used instead of science, then your TV and cell phones would not be working right now. If science is just a party trick, how do you explain that technology actually works? Note that religion has never produced a single new technology that worked.
But you have never built a TV by yourself and made it work. Therefore you have faith and man’s manual on how to make a TV and i have faith in God’s manual on life.
I don't need faith because the TV actually works. This demonstrated beyond doubt that the science is correct. I know enough about all the critical technologies in a TV to know that the descriptions are right, but beyond that those same descriptions are used by engineers to make things that actually work. No faith needed.
Faith is needed only when you have no evidence of something. Faith is a belief when you don't have evidence.
I know you think it is very clever to say that scientists need faith and I understand you want to say that science is just a world view like religion, but you are wrong. Science works by rejecting both faith and intuition. In place of that is a demonstration of the theory being promoted.
It does not matter that Einstein says relativity is true. What matters is that we can actually demonstrate the truth of relativity by actually building things that work. Religion has never produced a description of anything that actually works.
I’m saying is you have faith and how all this works only you have no idea how an electrical circuit works, nor do you have the equipment or laboratory to explain it to me via your personal testing. That is all I’m saying: Man has told you how it works and you believe them.
First of all, that is not true. I have a degree in physics and I am familiar with all the electronic principals involved. If I had to make a TV from scratch I think I could do it. But let's set that aside for a moment.
What does matter is that scientists write papers which are carefully checked for correctness because the actual lab measurements must be included. More importantly, other people have taken those papers, and then built things that actually work. We actually send rockets to the moon and that would not happen if the science was not correct.
Faith is belief when you have no evidence. There is no way to demonstrate the correctness of religion. Yet, I have tons and tons of evidence that science works, both in general and in specific situations. It is foolishness to think that religion is just like science. Religion does not require any evidence, it is all just hear-say. that is why you need faith for religion, not science.
Responding
I get so tired of this specious argument which is born out of a purposeful mendacity of Christian apologists. Can we speak truthfully here?
What you are actually saying is that you are incredulous. Your intuition does not support the believe, and so you think you need "faith" to override your intuition, and you claim that is what scientists are doing. This argument apparently works on Christians who believe their intuition is accurate. (it isn't)
A scientist must IGNORE their intuition, because intuition is faulty. But you don't replace it with faith, but instead to compose tests which could falsify the theory, and you look for those along with evidence confirming the theory.
Quantum mechanics is so strange that nobody finds it intuitive, but scientists don't resort to faith: they actually TEST the universe and either confirm or falsify the theory.
As you well know, that is NOT what religion does because as apologists point out, you should never test God. So, you rely on faith, which the scientist does not.
The second lie is that there is no evidence, and once again the apologist is leveraging that intuition. It is good enough to fool the gullible, but really, Christians that look into real science and real evolution find that there is plenty of evidence. Millions and millions of catalogued fossils testify to the correctness of the theory.
So, many Christians have been tricked into spouting these words, because they trust the apologist but they don't really know what scientists do. I would love to have a serious discussion to clarify all this to them, but most often they are doxastically closed and not receptive to this. In America we allow people to continue in their dream world if they wish to.