Defending the Faith: Even in science, faith isn't optional

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865622838/Even-in-science-faith-isnt-optional.html

Scientific faith: "When I flip this switch the light will go
on." (flips switch and nothing happens) "Hmmmm, maybe the power
is out." (checks lights in next room, finds they are OK) "Maybe
it's a bad bulb." (changes the bulb nothing happens). "There
might be a problem with the wiring . . . "

Religious faith: "When I flip this switch the light will go
on." (flips switch and nothing happens) "See how brightly it
shines!"

Love it!

Ugh. What a pile of doo-doo.

Science actually doesn't work at all with faith as a method of finding things out. Science actually is not a way to prove anthing. It's a method that attempts every way possible to disprove a thing. When that keeps being hard, we say "Well, this idea is getting really hard to knock down. We now are giving it a higher probability of being a fact." Faith is stupid.

A similar opinion about science has been expressed by a number of scientists, and in fact, this article is generally correct in stating that science proceeds initially by "some kind of faith." Science does not get off the ground without "faith" in the application of physical law, and faith that the "scientific method" will reveal information about ultimate reality as applied to a particular research program. Sometimes the starting point is little more than a hunch, or intuition. However, important distinctions are minimized in the article, as revealed in the following paragraph:

“The truth about science,” Steane writes, is that “it flourishes when scientists show faith in their theories: they embrace them because they are beautiful, and they put up some resistance to abandoning them. They take seriously serious counter-evidence, but they require it to prove its credentials.”

COMMENT: Although there are certainly "pet" scientific theories that become entrenched without sufficient supporting evidence, science generally and eventually, modifies or abandons such theories when faced with inconsistent evidence. Religion, on the other hand, does NOT take seriously counter-evidence. It is dominated by faith, whereas science is dominated by reason and evidence, after exercise of "a kind of faith" in their proposed theory, established scientific principles, and the reliability of supporting data.

"Thus, Steane argues, the neat division that some claim to see between reason and science on the one hand and, on the other, religious faith and irrationality, is largely illusion. “Faith of some kind is not optional,” he says. “We only get to choose what we put our faith in.”

COMMENT: I agree that faith "of some kind" is not optional in science. However, what a scientist chooses to put his or her faith in is ultimately based upon data, evidence and reason. Religion is fundamentally a faith in God, without any reliable methodology to determine whether ultimately that faith can be relied upon or is misplaced.

So, although this article was somewhat misleading, the fact that it was written by a Mormon apologist, or that a Christian scientist is acknowledging a role for faith in science, is not sufficient to label it nonsense.

Scientific 'faith' is going with less than 100% certainty of a claim, or settling for approximations and models instead of Truth where nature turn out to be a little too complicated for our intellect to follow. That is nowhere near what religious faith is about. Religious faith is emotional commitment to a claim of alleged absolute truth regardless of it's degree of knowability or testability. It's apples and oranges. Scientific 'faith' serves to motivate you to modify your pet theory in accordance with new evidence and valid criticism, religious faith serves to protect your claims from criticism and empirical demonstration.

Obviously scientists are humans as are religious believers (sometimes even the same humans). The psychology of knowledge is therefore the same. Thus intuition and 'faith' e.t.c. as part of human nature are inescapable realities in both science and religion. But how they play out in these different enterprises are not the same at all.

This should be called abuse of semantics. "Faith" had many definitions. If I say I have faith in my surgeon, I'm saying I'm confident of her abilities. That faith is nothing like religious faith, which is belief in the unknown.

A scientist may have faith in something which has yet to be definitively proven. The difference is that when the evidence begins to come in against the thing in question, the scientist will abandon faith and look for the truth, while the faithful will ignore the evidence and cling to the faith.

Exactly. Someone who only relies on faith will continue to cling to their beliefs, regardless of the evidence. You see that with Mormons who believe the Book of Mormon is literally true, while the evidence shows that Native Americans didn't come from Israel.

The ability to imagine how something might be, to form a testable hypothesis, is not "faith."

The application of "laws" shown correct by tens, hundreds, thousands, or millions of tests and observations, is not "faith."

"Faith" is belief *without* any evidence, logic, or rational basis. While there are sometimes proposed hypotheses in science that don't have a basis in evidence, logic, or rational thought, those hypotheses aren't "believed" to be true -- they're proposed as something that is to be tested to SEE if it's "true" or not. Acceptance or rejection (not "belief") follows from the results of those tests.