h2. This is not a theology weblog.
I thought I’d put that up there, just in case it wasn’t obvious. Generally I write about science–or scientists, at least–but Dr Isis reminds me that I’ve been thinking about the relationship of faith with science for a little while now. When I first started science-blogging I vowed not to enter the whole science versus religion debate, but it’s Sunday Monday night, I’m avoiding the vodka in the freezer and when you break promises you should do it good and proper; so I’m taking a deep breath and diving right in. Be warned. I might mention the ‘E’ word. I’m not deceiving myself by thinking that I might change any minds, and I don’t pretend to have any new or incisive insights. Put simply, there have been a few things knocking around my head and I think they need saying, so I’m going to write them down.
A false dichotomy
One of the problems with the science:faith dichotomy is that it isn’t, in fact, a dichotomy. Science is a way of understanding the natural world; a way of trying to understand what goes on around us. We observe something interesting, we think of a explanation for the observation, and we design an experiment to test that explanation. It works pretty well, and has given us all sorts of cool stuff such as antibiotics, computers, global warming and iPhones (yes: these are ‘technology’, which is the appliance of science, as the old ad used to say).
Faith, on the other hand, and I might get into a lot of trouble here, isn’t primarily a way of understanding the world. Certainly not the natural one. It is (and I’m concentrating particularly on the Christian faith, so your mileage may vary. I’m also being very careful to talk about ‘faith’ and not ‘religion’) a response to revelation. What you might do when someone says to you, ‘Uh, there’s something you should know’ (and anyone who says ‘religion has caused more wars’ or anything equally fatuous is going to get slapped, right? Let’s keep the tone a little higher than that, please).
Now, the full working out of that faith, in time, does lead to what we might call a worldview, but it’s not necessary nor sufficient. The beauty of faith is that it’s not an intellectual exercise. Anyone can join in, at whatever level they like. It doesn’t require you to be clever–or rich, or middle-class, or college-educated. But it doesn’t have to stop there–faith can expand according to your ability. Indeed, as someone’s faith grows they will find that it permeates more and more of their life and outlook. In fact, they will probably find themselves becoming a sceptic.
A sceptic, despite what the internets tell you, isn’t necessarily an unbeliever. A sceptic is one who questions, one who doesn’t take anything on faith (and I must piss off my friends mightily because it’s naturally difficult for me to take what anyone says without wanting to verify it myself). Someone who, in fact, might make a reasonable scientist. Now, you might say that my definition negates the possibility of a sceptic having faith: but that would be because you misunderstand the nature of ‘faith’.
The old joke goes that the definition of faith is believing something you know not to be true. Yes Victoria, it’s a joke–but you can understand why people think it. A lot of the faithful do seem, sometimes, to believe stuff that appears crazy or just plain wrong. But the writer of the letter to the Hebrews says that faith is ‘being sure of what we hope for, and certain of what we do not see’. Not, you’ll notice, ‘being sure of something I just made up’. It presupposes a reason to be hopeful, to be certain. Faith does not exist in a vacuum: I might hope for a million bucks in my final pay cheque on Thursday, but I actually have no reason to expect it might happen. On the other hand, if someone I had reason to trust told me to look out for a huge bonus, then not expecting anything wouldn’t be sceptical–it’d be irrational.
To put it another way, people don’t have faith, or believe in something they can’t see, for no reason. In fact, if you talk to them you might find that they have very good reason (although not proof, and they’d happily admit as much) to have faith: on balance, given their experiences and the evidence they have seen, faith is a perfectly rational position. Faith is about weighing evidence, and then making a decision based on what you know so far. We have the phrase ‘a leap of faith’ for a reason. And perfectly sane, rational, sceptical people will make that leap because they think the evidence justifies that decision.
These are obvious (to me) points, but given some of the fights that happen in less ‘accessible’ parts of the internet I think they bear making; because there seems to be an implicit assumption among a lot of otherwise reasonably educated people that science and faith are two ways of looking at the same thing, i.e. the natural world; and furthermore that no rational person could ever have faith in anything supernatural.
And that leads us to all sorts of problems because we get the faithful qua faithful making claims about science and the natural world; and scientists qua scientists making claims about faith.
I’m going to think about that a little more in Part 2.
