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Mar 8, 2016 @ 04:24 PM 83,251 views
No, Science Is Not Faith-Based

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Ethan Siegel, Contributor
Image Credit: T. Pyle/Caltech/MIT/LIGO Lab.

Image Credit: T. Pyle/Caltech/MIT/LIGO Lab.

Even the most well-learned scientist, working within the frameworks of the most robustly tested and verified theories, can never be certain that the next experiment or measurement will continue to provide the results that we expect. Last month, when the LIGO collaboration announced the direct detection of gravitational waves for the first time, it confirmed a new aspect of Einstein’s general relativity: one that had been predicted and whose consequences had been seen indirectly — through the decay of neutron star orbits — but one that we couldn’t be sure about until we validated it directly. But writing in the Wall Street Journal, Matt Emerson makes the erroneous claim that science is faith-based, too. Here’s the crux of his argument, followed by why it falls apart.
Image Credit: SXS, the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) project (http://www.black-holes.org).

Image Credit: SXS, the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) project (http://www.black-holes.org).

He quotes physicist Carlo Rovelli, who wrote that the discovery of gravitational waves was the realization of a “dream based on faith in reason: that the logical deductions of Einstein and his mathematics would be reliable.” He quotes Paul Davies, who wrote, “Just because the sun has risen every day of your life, there is no guarantee that it will therefore rise tomorrow. The belief that it will—that there are indeed dependable regularities of nature—is an act of faith, but one which is indispensable to the progress of science.” And then, based on the use of the word “faith” in these two sentences, he makes the following leap:

Recognizing the existence of this kind of faith is an important step in bridging the artificial divide between science and religion, a divide that is taken for granted in schools, the media and in the culture. People often assume that science is the realm of certainty and verifiability, while religion is the place of reasonless belief. [...] The fundamental choice is not whether humans will have faith, but rather what the objects of their faith will be, and how far and into what dimensions this faith will extend.

To be willing to make this statement is to deliberately misunderstand what the enterprise of science is, and how it fundamentally differs from any theological conclusion one could ever reach.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/UCDavis/W.Dawson et al; Optical: NASA/STScI/UCDavis/W.Dawson et al., of the Musket Ball cluster, which clearly shows the separation of dark matter (in blue) from normal, X-ray emitting matter (in pink). This indirect detection, however, still does not conclusively prove the particle nature of dark matter.

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/UCDavis/W.Dawson et al; Optical: NASA/STScI/UCDavis/W.Dawson et al., of the Musket Ball cluster, which clearly shows the separation of dark matter (in blue) from normal, X-ray emitting matter (in pink). This indirect detection, however, still does not conclusively prove the particle nature of dark matter.