[FoRK] Faith and/or Science dingding redux

[Sat N]

Any good religion will dispatch its most respected
clerics/cardinals/priests to defend itself when faced with criticism.

Science being one such good religion has called for the help of its
own priests( scientists) to its rescue.


On Nov 26, 2007 1:52 PM, Tom Higgins <tomhiggins at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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."
>
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