Science is based on faith?

[thiosk]

I've gone through a few of the responses here, and its scary. I'm a professional scientist, doing publicly funded scientific investigation at a major American university. I am pleased that a number of you trust and, dare I say, believe, in 'Science' over prescientific and pseudoscientific theories... but the vast majority don't really know the difference, and know just enough to tangle yourselves in semantics over words like faith and belief.

All I will offer to you is the following.

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4324

Brian Dunning is a TREMENDOUS writer that deals SPECIFICALLY with the debunking of pseudoscientific theory, and he does a podcast and writes an article each week dealing with one conspiracy theory or another, and approaches it rationally.

Read him. He is a great primer for people who want to have a skeptical mind, but weren't specifically trained.

 

[A.A.K]

eh. Science is not infallible, and science doesn't prove all the answers.
Shit just happens.
I truly do enjoy learning about the world around me and I've subscribed to a couple science magazines... but science is just a means to an end in my eyes.
Science was the tool to allow the gods to create us and this world we live in. Nothing wrong with science. Nothing wrong with believing in gods.

Captcha: what is this word backwards: rorrim
..interesting perspective.

 

[Anatoli Ossai]

Science is still based on evidence, it just so happens the evidence we currently have for any given topic could be wrong, we might not be seeing the whole picture or the limitation of us being human is whats causing us to error (in other words we will never know the answer). Because of all that we have to take some degree of faith into it to make many of our theories work at all. I just think people are frightened at the idea that science might not be entirely infallibility

Science was born out of Curiosity. The relics of religious movements were a part of that but in due time its reach was beyond grasp and never provided answers towards the advancement of a societal technology. Science isn't supposed to be infallible. Its very design is based on the ability to challenge and falsify. If an idea does not falsifiable its either faith or based on its own rules like Mathematics.

 

[A.A.K]

No, no. I'm simply saying we need to make sure to make a distinction between the two as definitions. Religious people can be faithful, certainly. But faith and religion are not necessarily one in the same. I don't think that's so different from the common definition.

Religious claims, almost in their entirety, are without evidence and taken on faith. The distinction you're talking about - between "religious" and "faithful" - doesn't really exist, and certainly not in the way you outlined in your previous post. The only difference there is how much people can take on faith. Which is generally the exact same thing as how religious one is.

In undertaking a year of a philosophy degree at a catholic Uni (and not being catholic, turns out that was a big waste of time and money)... the definition they explained between 'religious' and 'faithful' is akin to scotch and whiskey.
All scotch is whiskey, not all whiskey is scotch.
You can have faith in anything, or simply just have faith that there's 'something' there and that be all. You can have faith in science for all that it matters.
You can't be religious without faith, because being religious is placing your cards with the philosophy, the idea, the god, the book, whatever, that you believe resonates with you. That you feel right. You thereby have faith in their teachings, their god, their practices, etc etc.

 

[DSK-]

I feel compelled to post this link here.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0292917/quotes

I particularly love:

Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist.

 

[Grunt_Man11]

How do you define faith? I always defined it as "belief that is not based on proof." Under that definition no, no it's not. But if you define it as "confidence or trust in a person or thing" yeah I guess. In any case I think it was a poor choice of words due mostly to the fact that it has heavy religious connotation to it.

It's like if call "Through the worm hole with Morgan Freeman" propaganda for science. It's not incorrect, but propaganda has such a heavy negative connotation behind it that it doesn't get the point across well. So in the end a poor choice of words, but technically correct.

faith [fayth]
(plural faiths)
n
1. belief or trust: belief in, devotion to, or trust in somebody or something, especially without logical proof
I wouldn't put my faith in him to straighten things out.
2. religion or religious group: a system of religious belief, or the group of people who adhere to it
3. trust in God: belief in and devotion to God
Her faith is unwavering.
4. set of beliefs: a strongly held set of beliefs or principles
people of different political faiths
5. loyalty: allegiance or loyalty to somebody or something

All it takes is one.
Can you apply any one of these definitions to the pursuit of science, or Atheism?

If the answer is yes, then science and Atheism are based on faith.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

That doesn't weaken the case of those who criticize religion as being based on faith though.

Religion is not based on faith.

That sort of depends on the definition of 'faith' any one person is using (as they understand it), as it can mean 'believe', 'trust', 'following (with regards to a principle/teaching)', 'hope' or a combination of thereof and probably several other definitions I can't be arsed thinking about... English can be a really sloppy language at times and gets sloppier when translating concepts from other languages.

There's also the issue of the long running disagreements over what Religion is.

<end: shit you already know>

Of course, at a social level religions are indistinguishable from any other prominent social organs, at which point the 'faith' question stops being relevent as their are a multitude of other (psycho-social and socio-cultural) reasons for people to remain associated/identify with any given religion. The only differences then are ones of attitudes of Conviction versus Conformity.

 

[nik3daz]

Unless you do the studies/experiments yourself, you're taking someone else's word for it on the results.
That's taking it on faith.

Nahhhhhhhhhhhh. At least for generally accepted theories, there are mountains of everyday evidence that are based on the predictive powers of scientific theories. e.g theory of relativity causing the need for slight time corrections in GPS satellites, electromagnetic theories allowing for electrical generators

The argument is akin to "how can you know anything about [some year], were you actually there?". Disregarding evidence simply because it isn't firsthand is ridiculous, especially when you consider that your senses and cognitive biases often cause those firsthand "observations" to be inaccurate in some way. Better to acknowledge all evidence can be flawed and require a substantial amount of cross-validated evidence before accepting an idea.

 

[Navvan]

What the EC is trying to state is that science, and logic in general, must inherently start by making an assumption based on faith. For example, what I observe is real, is a fundamental assumption that we all make. We have faith that assumption is true even though it may not be the case. That is the extent of the issue.

This does not mean religion and science are equally logical ways to base your world view. Science/logical systems of thoughts attempt to only make the bare minimum of assumptions. Religion, in most cases, clearly does not. Religions make assumptions of faith for nearly the entirety of what the the religion claims to be true. In contrast logical systems/science only use it as a starting point.

 

[endnuen]

Sure it is.
The Higgs Boson, or God Particle was a scientific hypothesis until until very recently when it ascended to a scientific theory.
Basically it means that until they actually found it, scientists at the CERN facility were testing and researching something they believed existed.

And such, science is based in belief that may or may not be facts.

 

[Tanakh]

Exactly what I am saying. Yes it requires the least faith but faith never the less. Everything requires faith therefore science being part of everything requires faith, to deny that would not be particularly scientific.

Here's the thing, if you are trained in math, probability and sience you understand that by faith you refear to beliving in things like:

"Given any collection of bag, each containing at least one object, it is possible to make a selection of exactly one object from each bag."

That's the kind of faith sience requires, to belive that you can take an object out of any non empty bag...

Yet we use the same word for beliving that the future can be predicted by reading the entrails of chikens, all that stuff with Jesus with the virgin birth and the dove (and that man is soo close to using ruffies its fucked up) and the snake who talked in the garden. Honestly I don't think we, humans, should use the same word to "belive in rational stuff" that is, stuff based on logic and experience, and "belive in the stuff ancient people say while tripping"; because if we use the same word and accept it's the same, then you are forced to admit that creationism and evolution and freaking early 20th century eugenetics are just theories and all as valid as the next one. If you accept that everything it's faith based, then nothing has any freaking intrinsic value outside your head.

 

[Mycroft Holmes]

It's a question of Cartesian philosophy. As far as I know, no one has yet(nor ever will) counter Descartes argument on the provability of a provable reality beyond ones own mind. Therefore science is as faith based as anything really, or rather the results of science are.

 

[Denamic]

Faith is belief without evidence, and sometimes in spite of evidence.
Belief is not faith.

 

[Realitycrash]

I'm not going to read the last 240 or so posts because I can sum up the disagreement via a neat thing called 'induction'. You see, from the last dozen or so threads, I have gathered that the disagreement revolves around one person claiming 'But science is based on Axioms, and Axioms can't be proven, so science is based on faith too!', and the rest trying to show what an Equivalence-fallacy that is when comparing it to the 'Faith' we talk about when we discuss religion.
So, given that the last dozen or so threads about this have concerned that misrepresented issue, I here by conclude that within all probability, this is what people have been bitching about for the last seven pages.
However, as with any form of induction, my prediction can not necessarily be proven true, no matter how many times this thread repeats itself. I can not simply create an universal law which states that 'if something has repreated itself over and over ad nauseum, it must necessarily continue to repeat itself'. So my prediction is in itself based on 'faith', no matter how many times it is proven true.
See what I did there?

Long story short: Due to the problem of induction [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction], among other tings, almost everything is based on 'faith', since almost everything we believe is ultimately based on induction, but since said term is not equivalent with the term 'faith' when we talk about religion, and said term carries a whole mess of connotations, people get needlessly confused. Stop using that term. "Science" is based on Axioms, not 'faith'.

Edit: And to make things even easier

The problem of induction is the philosophical question of whether inductive reasoning leads to knowledge understood in the classic philosophical sense,[1] since it focuses on the lack of justification for either:

1:Generalizing about the properties of a class of objects based on some number of observations of particular instances of that class (for example, the inference that "all swans we have seen are white, and therefore all swans are white", before the discovery of black swans) or
2: Presupposing that a sequence of events in the future will occur as it always has in the past (for example, that the laws of physics will hold as they have always been observed to hold).

In inductive reasoning, one makes a series of observations and infers a new claim based on them. For instance, from a series of observations that a woman walks her dog by the market at 8am on Monday, it seems valid to infer that next Monday she will do the same, or that, in general, the woman walks her dog by the market every Monday. That next Monday the woman walks by the market merely adds to the series of observations, it does not prove she will walk by the market every Monday. First of all, it is not certain, regardless of the number of observations, that the woman always walks by the market at 8am on Monday. In fact, Hume would even argue that we cannot claim it is "more probable", since this still requires the assumption that the past predicts the future. Second, the observations themselves do not establish the validity of inductive reasoning, except inductively.

"Those who claim for themselves to judge the truth are bound to possess a criterion of truth. This criterion, then, either is without a judge's approval or has been approved. But if it is without approval, whence comes it that it is truthworthy? For no matter of dispute is to be trusted without judging. And, if it has been approved, that which approves it, in turn, either has been approved or has not been approved, and so on ad infinitum." - Sextus Empiricus

 

[Vausch]

I can really only thing of a few scenarios where faith is a basis in science, that's when there are 2+ theories that are equally valid with the current evidence available.

Scientist A could think String theory is a better theory than loop quantum gravity, scientist B could think otherwise. Both could hold the belief theirs is right due to the evidence available, but until we get the tools needed to verify one as more valid than the other it's a bit of a deadlock.