[FoRK] Faith and/or Science dingding redux

[Tom Higgins]

http://www.edge.org/discourse/science_faith.html

"1. Contrary to Davies' assertion, science is not based on "faith"
that physical laws will apply forever, or in different places in the
Universe. This is an observation—an observation that has not been
contradicted by any other data. Davies is completely off base when
claiming that "to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the
universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal,
mathematical laws of an unspecified origin. You've got to believe that
these laws won't fail, that we won't wake up tomorrow to find heat
flowing from cold to hot, or the speed of light changing by the hour.
" This is not a matter of faith. It's a matter of experience. In
contrast, the tenets of religion are truly based on faith, since there
is no empirical data to support them."


" To argue that physics is on the same level as religion is to ignore
the fact that religious faith broadly does not admit that it could be
wrong! Consequently, it performs no experiments or observations.
Religion is a broad topic of course, and there are myriad disparate
theologies and philosophies so it is impossible to generalize too
much. However, I am not aware of any religion that repeatedly tests
its propositions—either in terms of small details, or the broad
foundations—with experiments and observations. Surely this is not the
case with any Christian theology that I am aware of. "

"Davies lost my respect for his thesis early on, from the first
sentence actually, but I'll focus instead on this claim from his
second paragraph:

    All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a
rational and intelligible way. You couldn't be a scientist if you
thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends
haphazardly juxtaposed.

Perhaps this is where not being a physicist has the virtue of a
different perspective, because I can say without reservation that he's
completely wrong—in a historical science like evolutionary biology, we
have no problem when we encounter a phenomenon that isn't orderly or
rational, and that has all the appearance of haphazard
meaninglessness. We're accustomed to seeing simple chance as a strong
thread running throughout biological history."