In Defense of Understanding

This post is in response to the post and comments found on Google+ here.

Sigh.  Here we go - again.  The ignorance and unwillingness to understand, present on both sides of the "science vs. religion" debate, is both astounding and debilitating.  As a rational and caring person, I cannot let this stand unanswered.  Heads up: this comment is around 2,000 words long.  It is fully of my creation except where noted.

The Problem:

This is not an either/or topic.  Science and faith are not in any way mutually exclusive.  However, the institutions of science and religion, each with their particular dogmas, sometimes are.  Let's look at each in turn to see why that is.

First, FAITH:

Faith, like science, is a way of trying to understand a part of our reality.  There are parts of our experience as human beings that, so far, cannot be explained by scientific investigation.  Enter faith.

I'm using "faith" in the sense of "belief" (e.g., "I have faith in your abilities."), not "a system or institution of beliefs" (e.g., "My cousin just converted to the Jewish faith (religion).").  Here are a few accepted definitions of "faith", with sources:

- belief that is not based on proof (dictionary.com)
- great trust or confidence in something or someone (dictionary.cambridge.org)
- trust in something (thesaurus.com)
- firm belief in something for which there is no proof (merriam-webster.com)

Note that these definitions simply indicate that faith does not *require* proof.  They do not, in any way, indicate that faith would run *counter* to proof.  Two examples:

One may have faith that God exists and that He/She/It created us.  That's perfectly fine.  Faith in this context is *required* because it's not physically possible to show, as far as we yet know, that God does exist.  However, the lack of empirical evidence does not prove this faith to be false.

On the other hand, one may have faith that gravity doesn't exist, but that faith can't last long - it's a simple matter to prove that gravity does indeed exist since its effects can be readily and reproducibly observed and measured.  Empirical evidence to the contrary, particularly when it's strong enough, does prove this belief to be false.

Having faith in something despite mountains of contradicting evidence could be foolish.  Using faith to understand something that is impossible to prove or disprove is perfectly acceptable.

Faith is often concerned with meaning: the "why" questions of life.

Now, SCIENCE:

I'll use science as it is defined by dictionary.com, "systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation", and also use the word "science" to mean the formal systems and methods used to pursue that knowledge.

A very simple way of restating this is that science is concerned the "how things work".

The power of science comes from three main concepts:

1) it is based up empirical evidence.  That is, things that can be observed and measured.  (Note that "God" cannot be directly observed and so falls outside of science.  Nothing wrong with that.  Science, by its nature and due to its intersection with and reliance on mathematics, cannot be all-encompassing.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems)

2) evidence must be verifiable.  That is, I can perform one experiment in Ann Arbor, Michigan and get the same results (accounting for local variables, of course) as someone doing the same experiment in, say, Oslo or Sydney.  This is hugely important.

3) it's fine to be proved wrong.  That is, science, as a philosophy, does not claim any absoluteness of truth.  Skepticism is encouraged, even expected, in science.  Science is founded on the concept of "falsifiability"; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability.  (Note: falsifiable does NOT mean "false")

The reason there are so many revisions throughout the history of science is that the scientific understanding of the nature of reality continues to become more and more refined.  A primary enabler for this continued refinement has been advances in technology.  Another is the work - including both the successes and failures - of previous scientists upon which the then-current understanding is founded.  It's a continual process of learning and refinement.

This leads me to a mistake frequently made when discussing, particularly attempting to refute, scientific findings.  The mistake is to say that a "theory" is incomplete *and therefore must not be accurate*.  Let's look at the relationship between laws, hypotheses, and theories.

In science, "laws" are known to be complete and accurate within the context in which they operate.  They form the basis of various models used to understand phenomena.  Well known laws are those of Newton's three laws of motion, the four laws of thermodynamics, and the laws of conservation of mass, momentum, and energy.  Laws are axiomatic and have been proved to accurate in any context in which their axioms hold.  (This is, for example, why classical Newtonian mechanics gives way to quantum mechanics: at very high energies and on very small scales, the axioms of Newtonian mechanics break down and fail to be accurate.)

A hypothesis, in science, is nothing more than a *proposed* explanation of a phenomenon.  It must be tested rigorously before any conclusion can be drawn.  This is the starting point of any scientific investigation.

A theory is a collection of concepts and rules used to express relationships between observed phenomena, and is based on empirical evidence and held together by formal logic.  (I paraphrased https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory - note that the third paragraph mentions theories which fall outside the purview of science.  Such a theory could encompass the existence of God.)  It is falsifiable - it can be proved to be false in the face of sufficient contradictory evidence.

Thus, a theory such as Darwin's Theory of Evolution, is not taken to be either complete or absolute.  However, it is understood that a sufficiently massive amount of evidence exists which indicates that it may be a fairly accurate explanation of how the diversity of species which we now observe came to be.

(By the way, attempting to make an comparison between an inanimate "junk car" spontaneously repairing itself and the dynamic and animated components of life effecting small changes in complex organisms over the course of millions of generations is laughable.  It shows that the person making that comparison has no real understanding, or has a willful ignorance, of the theory of natural selection.)

As a scientific theory, natural selection (evolution) should be challenged.  But the fact that it is being challenged does not make it "false" or "inaccurate", as seems to be indicating.  I have read that article before and re-read it now.  It is not a critique of the theory of evolution, but of the PBS production "EVOLUTION".  Furthermore, the main points of the article have nothing to do with the accuracy or inaccuracy of so-called "Darwinism", but are concerned with political and cultural issues regarding how certain people, in this case the producers of "EVOLUTION", went about delivering  information.  This is indeed a good thing to question.  It's good to question scientific findings and it's certainly a good thing to speak out when there is undue bias, as seems to have been the case in the article.

Now DOGMA: SCIENCE AND RELIGION AS INSTITUTIONS:

Institutions develop around concepts as the concepts grow in popularity.  Institutionalization is not inherently bad, however institutions can be susceptible to the development of dogma.  This can be found nearly everywhere, including, but not limited to, institutions encompassing politics, science, religion, business, and education.  Dogma create real problems since they don't allow for dissent.  They don't allow for opposing view.

I'll use the definition from Wikipedia, as it is well phrased: "Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, or a particular group or organization. It is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from, by the practitioners or believers."

Dogma is absolute.  Because of this, it is impossible to refine an dogmatic model for understanding without some very serious implications.

Here I'll agree with what said regarding cultural assumptions about science as rational vs. religion as irrational.  This is definitely prevalent and is small-minded.

Religion is most often bashed as being corrupted to the core with dogma, but science is no less immune.  Why?  Both religion and science are practiced and understood /by people/.  People have inherently limited faculties for understanding and communicating.  We are subject to psychological factors such as egotism, defense mechanisms, and even plain ol' laziness.  We tend to adhere to the familiar and vehemently fight anything which threatens it.  Combined with a desire to secure our individual positions in society (in other words, to attain and maintain power), it becomes easy to understand how dogmatic thinking comes to exist.

Science and religion, in their purest essences of "seeking understanding through evidence and logic" and "seeking understanding through intuition and faith", respectively, are free from poisonous dogmas.  They are both concerned primarily with *seeking to understand*.  Thus, both scientific findings and faith-based beliefs should be questioned.  By questioning, we learn if we are using an accurate model for our experiences or not.  We will strengthen models of understanding which find support and can discard ones that do not.

Imagine a world where we lack the ability to reason or question.  It would be immeasurably different from the one we enjoy today.

Additionally, a large amount of religious teachings come in the form of various types of metaphor.  This is as true of the Bible as of the ancient Greek myths.  Care should be taken to separate the literal from the metaphorical.

I don't know *how* God created the universe, precisely, but I'm reasonably sure that it did not occur in six literal "days".  I'm also reasonably sure that the abundant and teeming life we see on earth did spontaneously come into existence when God gave the word.  Why?  Because neither of these ideas fit with what we measurably and reproducibly observe.  This might be a situation where the biblical account is more metaphorical than literal.


CONCLUSION (finally, I know...)

So what questions do we ask?  This is another place where science and faith diverge, and at a somewhat fundamental level.  Science is primarily concerned with "how"-type questions.  Faith, as a philosophical method of understanding, is concerned very much with "why" type questions.

One can use their faith to attempt to answer the question, "why did God create the world and us in it?"  This nurtures our spiritual selves and helps us find meaning in our lives.  Terrific!

One can use science to attempt to answer "how did the world come to be as we see it now and how does it function?"  This helps us understand how to support and improve ourselves physically and mentally.  Outstanding!

Sure there are holes in scientific understanding that need to be filled, as there are holes in the various religious understandings.

Now, getting back to the graphic that started this thread, science (the method, not the institution) did get us to the moon.  Religious dogma, in particular the dogma of a fundamental and radical ideology, did convince some people to fly planes into buildings.  The graphic is accurate, but also deliberately inflammatory.  It "preaches to the choir" and adds nothing meaningful to the dialog.  It plays on word meanings to inflame the desire of people who have a particular mindset to attack others in order to bolster an unnecessary defense.  I'm certainly not saying that there aren't equally damaging items produced by the other side of the "battle".

However, science stands on its own, as does faith, and their defenses need no bolstering.  Neither religious faith nor scientific pursuit are the problem.  Intolerance is.  Intolerance of religion, based on scientific dogma, is no less reprehensible than its inverse, or any other type of intolerance.

We need to back down from our defensive postures and attempt to make some real dialog.  Let's be a bit more rational.  There are more serious issues at stake.