From: Scott Roberts (jse885@earthlink.net)
Date: Fri Oct 08 2004 - 19:28:41 BST
Mark,
> msh says:
> To sate that scientists have "faith" in science in the way theists
> have "faith" in God is to denigrate science, as well as to reveal a
> high ignorance of scientific method. It is a grotesque and dishonest
> use of the word.
>
> Platt's list of scientific "faiths", to the extent that it is at all
> accurate, is nothing more than a list of apriori assumptions made in
> order to kick-start a highly valuable system of thought. You might
> as well say that mathematicians have faith in the square root of two.
I agree that Platt is misusing the word "faith", and that pretty much along
the lines that you say. However, that does not imply that the value of
science has been denigrated. Meanwhile, there are some faith-based claims
(such as the belief that mind is reducible to matter) that some folk put
forward as scientific.
>
> Finally, science has a history of well-defined mistakes and
> corrections. Religious faith is, by definition, not falsifiable.
> Any attempt to draw some faith-based parallel between science and
> religion is doomed to failure if not fraud.
Religious faith has changed, however. One of its big changes is that
--always excluding religious fundamentalists -- Christians (to be specific)
acknowledge that they lost the battles against science (Galileo,
evolution), but more importantly they acknowledge that they deserved to
lose, and that religion has been improved thereby. Modern theologians now
understand that faith must evolve and adapt to new knowledge and
circumstances. So to say that religious faith is not falsifiable is not
entirely accurate. It is certainly not falsifiable in the way science is,
since faith (now) deals with the non-empirical. But it is open to rational
investigation.
What I find annoying are critics of religion who have not studied it. No
modern non-fundamentalist theologian is ignorant of the value of science,
but how many critics of religion are familiar with modern theology? Of
course one can be familiar with theology and still be a critic. But, for
example in the recent Problem of Evil thread, this argument against the
existence of God was presented as if theologians hadn't been analyzing it
up, down, and sideways for millenia.
- Scott
- Scott
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