Part Two: What is Science? What is Faith?

Of course, the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people's minds. It's best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you're safe. That doesn't leave you very much to believe in, but that's scientific too.

― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

I'm not going to get too carried with definitions here; this isn't supposed to be an academic treatise.  Nor should the reader consider my definitions particularly authoritative.  They're researched, but volumes since antiquity have been exhaustively written on the subject. 

If you're interested try some Karl Popper's Science, Pseudoscience and Falsifiability, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (free ePub here), Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Amazon), or Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach (Amazon).

What is Science?

Science comes from scientia, one of a few Latin words meaning knowledge. And for a long time, it meant simply that: knowledge of a specific subject.  It's still used in this sense today for terms like political science, or library science.  What we commonly know as science today was referred to as natural philosophy until the 19^th century or so.  It is a study of nature, in a particular systematic way.

What is nature?  Anything that can be sensed. Knowledge obtained through our senses is called empirical knowledge. Hypothesizing that the universe is just a dream a butterfly is having is something that one cannot (presumably) test using our five senses.  Thus it lies beyond the ken of science and in the realm of the supernatural or, in philosophy, metaphysics.

Famed physicist Richard Feynman said "The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific 'truth'."  Karl Popper summed the whole enchilada up nicely as "trial and error."

Gratuitous lol catz.

Mathematics is not science.  It is not concerned with nature (i.e. empirical knowledge).  It is a language; a very specific and remarkably beautiful language, but a language all the same.  Numbers have no existence outside our thoughts.  Same for logic.  They are languages often used to communicate science.

When I refer to science I'm also talking about the scientific method.  Very basically it involves forming a hypothesis, predicting an outcome based on the hypothesis and then devising an experiment to test it.  The experiment should be designed to try to falsify the hypothesis.  You're actually aiming for a fail.

Experiment is empirical, reproducible and measurable observation conducted in a controlled ("objective") manner and devised to disprove the hypothesis.  

Science involves three kinds of inference (and this is disputed to, but we'll accept them here for the sake of the argument).

Abduction:      Guessing; think of the old game Twenty Questions.  This is the source of the hypothesis.

Induction:         Induction involves developing general statements based on specific knowledge.  For instance "The sun always rises" is induction.  We make this general statement based on the empirical knowledge that it has always risen before.

Deduction:        Making specific findings based on a general premise.  For instance:
Premise:      All elevator music sucks
Observation:  Tool does not suck.
Conclusion:   Tool is not elevator music.

An example of deduction.

What is Faith?

Faith, of course, can have many definitions, but for the sake of the argument here faith is an unwarranted certainty of truth.  It is acceptance of something as absolutely true without supporting evidence actually,  even in the face of opposing evidence.

I've never heard of anyone describing it in these terms, but I'm going to define belief as faith-lite.  Something that you think, on the balance of probabilities, will be true without rational reason for doing so.  


Belief is the expectation of truth; faith is the certainty of truth.

There is no certainty in science.  It is based, ultimately, of empirical knowledge, and the knowledge provided to us through our senses is incomplete because our senses are imperfect.  If there was any doubt of that before, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, among others, put that to rest.  Well there is still some uncertainty; this is science after all.

People of religious faith may argue that faith comprises more than a simple acceptance of an unverified truth.  Faith can also mean trust in moral goodness, or a connection to a transcendental reality or Supreme Being, ort a means to enlightenment.  We'll examine these different aspects of faith a little later.

OK with that out of the way, onto the argument:  Does science require faith?