Faith and Works

At some point in our evolution we acquired some skill at divining the motives and plans of others. It's a very useful skill for a social animal, but I suspect also that it might be connected with an interesting side effect - our habit of asking why and how and who questions. These questions are intimately bound up with a couple of characteristically human activities: science and religion.

Paul Davies recently managed to kick up a storm in the bloggiverse and beyond by writing an op-ed in the NYT called: Taking Science on Faith . He argues:

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.

I'm not sure how the conventionally religious take this notion of asserting parallel status for science and religion, but the doctrinaire atheistic religion is hysterical about the heresy. John Wilkins gets philosophically indignant here, accusing Davies of "enthymeme" and other foreign word crimes, but doesn't make any sense to me. PZ Myers checks in with a link to Wilkins and his own rather more coherent post, which I still consider flawed. His problem seems to be fear of equivalency. I can't quite decide if Davies is really arguing for that equivalency or not. Maybe he's just angling for a big grant from the Templeton foundation. Sean Carroll gets it almost exactly right, I think:

Why do the laws of physics take the form they do? It sounds like a reasonable question, if you don't think about it very hard. After all, we ask similar-sounding questions all the time. Why is the sky blue? Why won't my car start? Why won't Cindy answer my emails?

And these questions have sensible answers—the sky is blue because short wavelengths are Rayleigh-scattered by the atmosphere, your car won't start because the battery is dead, and Cindy won't answer your emails because she told you a dozen times already that it's over but you just won't listen. So, at first glance, it seems plausible that there could be a similar answer to the question of why the laws of physics take the form they do . . .

But, says Sean, there isn't.

But there is a deep-seated human urge to think otherwise. We want to believe that the universe has a purpose, just as we want to believe that our next lottery ticket will hit. Ever since ancient philosophers contemplated the cosmos, humans have sought teleological explanations for the apparently random activities all around them. There is a strong temptation to approach the universe with a demand that it make sense of itself and of our lives, rather than simply accepting it for what it is.

That "deep seated human urge," I think, is exactly the point. Our instinct for making sense of things is oriented to perceiving the motivations and purposes of others. When you turn this powerful instrument on the natural world, it is natural to impute to it motivation and purpose - thus the near universality among primitive peoples of spiritist religions. Most modern religions are a natural outgrowth of that association of natural events with the plans of a god or gods.

Science takes a different path, but one that has a common evolutionary history, I think. Instead of imputing natural events to fickle purpose, it explains them by more impersonal laws and rules. The common thread is the desire to organize and make sense of the world. It might be a stretch to call that "faith" in the explicability of the world, but hardly a big stretch.