Faith and Science

This morning is not as cold as it's been but it's chilly and sort of gray out. I got a new jacket last week, and have been a little shy to wear it -- it's fur, and maybe it's too much. But I wore it last night and this morning when I walked the dog, and it's possible I'll get used to it. Back in the day nothing was too much, I guess I'm mellowing with the years.

Or maybe not.

Yesterday my friend and I played music for six hours straight. We ended up doing a bunch of Roy Orbison songs, and today my throat is a little sore. My fingertips are also kind of crunchy, but I have been picking up the guitar every day and playing a little, so there are at least some callouses now. He plays bass and I play guitar, and we stood there in his basement drinking sangria out of a box and playing old songs. It turns out I know a whole lot of Buddy Holly songs. And Merle Haggard, too, but he doesn't like to play that country stuff, we generally stick to old rock and roll, which is centered on the early Sun recordings but includes Elmo James and George Jones, if you know what I mean. I am thinking about getting some software so I can set up a kind of home recording studio; I recently watched a documentary about Les Paul and Mary Ford, and how they recorded everything in their house, and I think that would be fun. I've been writing songs again -- actually, yesterday while my friend was trying to burn me a CD I played some of my old songs, just by myself, and they sounded pretty good. Well, I've got enough going on already without that, but it's fun.

The New York Times had an opinion piece yesterday by a professor at Arizona State University, which I attended for two unimpressive years back in the sixties. This guy, Paul Davies, is a physicist, calls himself these days an "astrobiologist," which sounds cool but ... well, I'm not going to criticize his science, it looks like he's a person who takes a broad view of things, and I'm in favor of that, sometimes researchers narrow their field too much.

The piece is long, and I want to show you but don't want to paste the whole thing in here. Here's the start, which I think catches the gist of his case:

SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. 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. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.

The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion — all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do? Taking Science on Faith

First of all, he does overstate the case. Nobody thinks science is perfect, it's just the best we've got. As biological agents we are limited in our ability to be objective, we can only sense the world through human senses and interpret what we see from the point of view of human beings. The endeavor to improve measurement and analysis, and to design experiments that test important hypotheses, has been very successful, but it is not perfect. In the long run, all we are doing is making adjustments to the brains that nature gave us, programming the meatware.

I think he's wrong to contrast scientific belief with faith. True, they're different things, but not that different; scientific knowledge is based on carefully developed evidence, but every skeptic realizes that a leap of faith is required in order to believe that the empirical world exists at all. Without that grain of faith you'd be schizophrenic, living in your own self-absorbed universe, solipsistically doubting the existence of everything; I don't think any serious thinker would say that you could have science without faith.

It seems to me that the difference between scientific knowledge and religious knowledge has to do with intention, as contrasted with causation. The scientist finds that things are the way they are because something caused them to be that way. The religious believer finds that things are the way they are because somebody made them that way.

What would be the difference between a world that someone made intentionally and the exact same world without intention? I'm asking if an atheist and a believer walk around participating in the world, what will they see that's different?

The only difference will be the way they feel about it. Say, I have a drawing on my refrigerator that my daughter made for me when she was four. I look at that drawing with a certain feeling that you, coming into my kitchen, would not have, because I know her and I know she made the drawing for me. The religious believer feels like that in the world, has a sentimental connection to existence, a feeling that the world was intentionally made just the way it is, with love.

There would not have to be any difference in what the believer and the skeptic predict will happen next, no difference in understanding how the world works, so the pragmatist sees the distinction between faith and no-faith as meaningless, having no cash value. But there's the rub: meaning. If the world is made by an intentional being, then meaning is actually a property of the world itself. If that is the case, then the human intellect is an instrument for revealing meaning. The alternative is that meaning is something socially constructed by humans with brains, transparently experienced as a quality of the world, as part of the package we call "the human condition." I am talking about the difference between discovery and invention.

So maybe faith is the unskeptical acceptance of meaning as a quality of the world, intentionally put there by a divine creator. Wouldn't it be nice to walk around in a world brimming with true meaning, made with love? I can't really see anything to object to there, and I also don't see why that feeling would be incompatible with any aspect of science. Well, I don't personally choose to feel that way, but I'm saying it's fine if other people feel that way.

The problems begin when I insist that my daughter's drawing is better than some other kid's drawing, when I confuse my feeling of special significance with objective knowledge. Of course I feel that way, the drawing means something special to me, but the drawing on your refrigerator has special significance to you, and you might think your kid's drawing is better than my kid's. Because our own kids' drawings are special to us, we may reify our feelings and think they are objectively special, especially if we believe that meaning is a true quality of the world that is revealed to our minds, and that's a problem. Someone coming into my kitchen would sadly fail to see what I see in that drawing, which could be as bad as being blind as far as I'm concerned.

Similarly, if I believe with all my heart that my God created the world and gave it meaning, and you believe otherwise, we will each think of the other as deluded. And that is not a good basis for a friendship.

There's really nothing wrong with believing that God set up the big bang and the process of evolution, carefully designing the cosmological constants so that the universe would remain stable through human lifetimes and so on -- that's all fine, it doesn't change a thing. You can't prove that there is intention behind the world, or that there isn't, so you choose whatever makes you feel better. Either view may be correct, and either may be illusion -- you'll never prove it either way.

I am ignoring the ones who say that the world was literally made in seven days, 6,000 years ago or whatever they believe. They are free to believe that, but they are simply wrong. There is no point in arguing with authoritarians.

There have been religions that stopped just before the point we've come to, where the seeker learns to sense the presence of the divine in every moment, and discounts other thoughts as vanity and illusion borne necessarily by mortal nature. Unfortunately most people are not content with that. People want some intervention in their lives, they want a personal contact with the spirit world, they want an explanation for why things are the way they are and somebody to hold accountable for it all, they want to know that the world was made for their own happiness. Next thing you know, you've got competing deities, and worse, you've got explanations that conflict with empirical evidence, challenging good-hearted faith.

I don't usually talk here about my own beliefs, but I will say I personally am most comfortable with a flavor of panpsychism that keeps bringing me back to the teachings of Lao Tsu. My intuitions on this topic are pretty well described in THIS paper, if you're interested. I don't think consciousness could possibly be created in a brain, I think the brain exploits the subjective quality of the world by making it reflexive and giving it content; what's different about us is not that we're conscious, but that we're conscious of things. Intention, I'm afraid, presumes embodiment, and so I don't see that anything is gained by believing that a disembodied will lies behind the machinations of the universe; but that doesn't mean the universe is barren or uncaring. That's just what I think, I don't expect anyone else to walk down that road with me.