Does Science Require Faith? Part the First

If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents -- the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else's. But if their thoughts -- i.e., Materialism and Astronomy -- are mere accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true    

  -- C.S. Lewis

A friend of mine, Justin, posed a challenge to me back in engineering school twenty years ago that I'm still trying to figure out.  I don't see why anyone who would pose a question so vexing that it still keeps me up at night decades later should be considered a "friend" but there you have it. 

I was quite self-satisfied with myself back then, having read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Tao of Physics, and was expounding, I believe, on the idea that god could and would be derived through mathematics.  Most people just ran away or stood there nodding dumbly as I dropped words like "quantum entanglement" and "implicate order."  But not Justin.  Noooo.  Justin has a nasty habit of running amok in the serenity of one's spiritual garden, trampling the rose bushes and rummaging through the fountains for spare change, so to speak.

He slowly, and with (this made it worse) absolutely no malice, deconstructed my notion of some uber-rational argument for the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent being.  He pointed out in agonizing detail how my theory was exactly like taking a bunch of cool-sounding quantum buzzwords, throwing them in a blender and hitting Frappé. He  methodically went through my argument demonstrating where I had made my many unwarranted leaps; that my entire argument was ultimately sustained by a simple act of faith in how I thought things were.  At least I think that's what he said.  I might have been drunk at the time.

I staggered out of there like Pee Wee Herman after five  rounds with Mike Tyson. 

He was right about my theory. I couldn’t even understand a Schrödinger wave equation, so I shouldn't have been bandying about graduate level quantum concepts like the Swedish Chef mixing up a batch of meatballs.

Esh moom der hurly impleekat odor bork der bork

But that's not what bugged me. Justin wasn’t trying to disparage my argument because it was faith-based.  On the contrary, his point of view was--and still is, as far as I know--that science is faith-based, that it ultimately depends on accepted yet unwarranted assumptions.  Something about turtles; you'd have to ask him.  He was merely trying to demonstrate this point to me.  Anyways, that was twenty years ago, and it still keeps me up nights.

Does science require faith?

I was hoping for an easy answer, but, as someone once quipped, "Truth lies at the bottom of a bottomless pit." 

You have to differentiate, to start with, between knowledge and belief.  What exactly is knowledge?  Is knowledge truth?  Is faith the expectation of truth?  What is truth? Now you can see why I've been working on this so long.

In search of that answer I've been many rabbit holes and visited many wonderlands.  However, I finally have an answer and the answer is...

I've metaphorically hacked my way through dense jungle, forded torrential rivers, and climbed the iciest spires, through the stark pinnacles of human thought and imagination. At last I travelled the Path of Enlightenment to reach the verdant Valley of Truth. Guess who beat me to it?  This guy.

Seriously, I have no answer but it's been such a wonderful journey that I stopped looking for one. That's the thing about enlightenment.  To reach it you have to let go, but once you let go, you lose all desire to reach.

Over the next few Mindfingers posts I'm going to examine the issue a little, roughly defining what I mean by science and faith, seeing what other folks have said, looking at deductive and inductive reasoning, articulating a bit on what knowledge and belief are, and then wrapping it all up in a tortilla, slapping some salsa onthat baby, and down the hatch!  It will probably the most boring thing you've ever read.  Just so you know.

For a warm-up, here's an old riddler that epistemologists (philosophers who study knowledge) like to throw out at parties, if they were ever to get invited to one.

You have a guy with no senses.  He's blind, deaf, can't smell or taste, and can feel nothing at all.  You somehow manage to keep this guy alive until he's 21.  The questions:  Does he have a thought in his head, and if so, what is that thought?

(a)    No thought at all; his mind is a blank slate

(b)    One thought:  "Boy, am I ever screwed."

(c)    We are born with certain a priori frameworks that provide context for the input of our senses, such as a sense of time and space, so he would sense those.

(d)    That question is moot.  Any thought or non-thought is ultimately unknowable to us, and therefore just an exercise in pure speculation.

(e)    other.

Interested to hear your answers.