Told you to trust me – more on faith and science

I want to return to the issue of faith in science. But there are two ways in which I mean “faith in science”. The first is the role that faith plays in the practice of science. This is important because some appear to argue that science is a frostily rational business where we step from the solid ground of one fact to the next, illuminating causal links and generating new, reliable knowledge along the way. This is contrasted with the faith which is involved in religion, usually assumed to be anti-fact and irrational. Second is the sense that you dear reader, should put your faith in science, as the only true route to enlightenment and happiness. It’s the only sure way to provide us with the necessary knowledge to keep us well fed and warm. You may not understand it yourself, but that’s fine because there’s a cadre of reliable, trustworthy and clever people (called scientists), and they will keep you right.

What is the role that faith plays in the practice of science? This is a hotly disputed topic, because there are those who feel highly insulted at the very notion that religious faith and the intellectual procedures of science are in any way comparable. And of course there have been attempts to distinguish between the sort of faith exercised by scientists and that involved in religion (see for example Paul Bloom’s article in the Atlantic). I find few of the arguments advanced compelling. Partly this is because many of the claims made about religious faith seem to be very different to my experience of faith as a believer. Bloom makes the following claim in his article:

“Science establishes conditions where rational argument is able to flourish, where ideas can be tested against the world”

This is another version of the rational science vs irrational faith argument; he implies that things are different in religion. My experience of Biblical Christianity is that rational argument flourishes, and that ideas are tested. I don’t leave my mind outside the door on Sunday (or any other day).  And while there are clearly points of tension where what the Bible teaches comes up against what is popularly believed, this evokes careful, rational thought and reflection - testing. Where there is an apparent conflict between what science appears to have established, and what Scripture appears to teach, again, careful thought is required. Sometimes, it will turn out that how I have understood Scripture is at fault. Sometimes, what it is claimed science has established will have been at fault, and Scripture vindicated. Science, like all human activity, occasionally, and spectacularly gets things wrong, particularly where it is misapplied to areas outwith its competence. And sometimes, I’ll just have to accept that neither I, nor you, nor anyone else knows it all, and that we all might have to wait for things to become clearer. The point is that none of this is irrational easy-believism. So I’m not convinced that the thinking I do in the lab, and the thinking I do in Church, are two very different kinds of thinking. There are differences, but these are more subtle than some would allow.

As for faith, it is involved in both places. In my lab I trust the work of others, and seek to build on it. I place my faith in a whole bunch of assumptions and background information that I never question (at least as long as there is no apparent problem). Some assumptions are a really big deal and actually play a role in me turning up to work at all. And I simply trust them. Take for example the fine-sounding notion of “the uniformity of nature” (UoN for short). This is the idea that if I conduct an experiment in my lab in Liverpool, and do it properly, and I get a particular result, I’ll get the same result tomorrow if I do everything the same. So the information I generate today has value tomorrow, next week, next year and so on. And the same result will be obtained if the same experiment is conducted in London, Lisbon, Lagos or Lahore. The information generated has value everywhere. If this we not the case why would I bother? But what proof do I have that the principle of the UoN exists? None really, beyond the experience that so far it seems to have held. It’s not something that I’ve investigated in any detail. It’s an article of faith. And one could multiply such examples. So faith, in the sense of a trust in people, and a trust in certain principles, provides a basis and framework for my practice and operates in my professional life as a scientist.  

As for the second sense in which I mean “faith in science”, it will probably have escaped your notice that there is a crisis going on in science. The pages of Nature (one of the most prestigious and widely read scientific journals), have been taken up over recent months with the issue of just how reliable science, or least some aspects of science, actually are. In fields as diverse as psychology and clinical trials the charge is that one of the most important principles in science has been routinely and radically undermined – the principle of reproducibility. This is the idea that important results must be repeated; that they must be both confirmable and confirmed. It’s for this reason that when I write a scientific paper, I have to include a section that details how I did what I did. This is so that other people have enough information to repeat it all, to check my results. However, with an increasing number of studies, either there isn’t enough information to repeat them, or when they have been repeated, the results have been different (sometimes very different). So it turns out that what we thought was reliable, was not so reliable after all.

There are all sorts of reasons why this isn't a surprise, least of all to scientists themselves. In part it’s down to current problems in scientific publishing. Constant pressure to be “concise” has led to people skimping on detail.  There’s also a real problem getting confirmatory studies, as opposed to studies showing novel results, published. It is also the case that the number of journals has multiplied over the last few decades and a lot of what is published is poorly designed in the first place, and poorly reviewed (this was alluded to in "The strange case..."). Perhaps a larger part of the problem is explicable because science is done by people. And scientists are morally indistinguishable from the rest of humanity. This means some are good, most are average, some are poor, and some (probably relatively few) are frankly fraudulent. So the information produced by professional science is no more privileged than other sorts of information. It’s necessary and good for some things within a particular domain, but even there it has to be scrutinised and thought about carefully.

All of us should be careful about what and who we put our faith in. If I want my broken leg fixed, I have to confess that I'll have little time for the views of my pastor on the matter. I’ll go to see my doctor (although possibly via my pastor’s wife who’s a GP). But if I want my street lighting improved, the physicist’s understanding of the particle/wave duality of light will not get me very far at all. My local councillor is likely to be a better bet. I'll put my faith in him or her to improve my lot, or at least make it more visible at night. In both cases I might be disappointed with the outcome. But horses for courses; that's a risk I would take. Practical living turns out to be more complex than the average faith vs science argument would have you believe. But who and what you put your faith in is very context dependant. Personally, when the context is eternal salvation, I know in whom I have believed.

Faith and aeroplanes

Every year the eye and vision science community (or at least a fairly large proportion of it) decamps to the United States for the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. This year I combined this trip with a quick visit to colleagues in Athens, Georgia. So I had to get on an aeroplane in Manchester and fly to Atlanta, then a few days later get on another one and fly to Seattle via Phoenix, Arizona, and about a week after that fly to New York and then back to Manchester. All of this was booked using the interweb or some such. Indeed, before I arrived at any airport, I parted with a large sum of cash (actually I trusted various electronic systems about which I know nothing to move money from my credit card account, to the account of various commercial organisation) trusting that when I turned up at the airport (or the hotel in Athens, or the apartment in Seattle) they would actually know who I was and let me use their services.

Let’s focus in on that first flight from Manchester to Atlanta. I did no investigation of any of the principles of aeronautical engineering, the mastering of which I was relying to keep the aircraft in the air. I exercised implicit trust (or faith) in the aircraft designers and manufacturers, trusting that they had known what they were doing when they designed and built that particular plane. This despite the fact that I know they have occasionally got things wrong in the past. Neither did I investigate the people who were using the presumably airworthy aircraft once it had been built, to transport me to my destination. I trusted them to use it properly and to get me safely to where I was going. This despite the fact that only a few months ago, one particularly disturbed but clearly qualified individual flew an aircraft into a mountain, killing all on board. And I didn’t think too much about all of those charged with stopping bad people causing problems; all those security people I could see, and all of those I couldn’t see. Apparently there are those who want to do me harm by interfering with things like aircraft. I trust lots of people to stop them. But I myself don’t check the competence or commitment of the airport security staff. I trust others to hire them, screen them, train them, motivate, pay and monitor them. This, despite that fact that I know that occasionally, bad people have slipped through the net and have managed to do bad things to aeroplanes, with catastrophic consequences. No, I exercised faith all the way along the line. And the way I behaved was evidence of my faith. I booked my ticket, checked-in on time, made my way to the gate when called, boarded the aircraft, settled into my seat and (I’m glad to report) safely arrived in Atlanta.

The faith I exercised wasn’t blind faith, or particularly naïve, or irrational. This is a flight I’ve made safely before. And in fact, most such flights, many thousands if not millions of them, have been completed safely before. So I had good reason to believe that my faith was not misplaced. While clearly bad things happen to aircraft, and currently one feels for the families grieving for those lost in troubling circumstances in the Mediterranean, such events are mercifully and relatively rare. So in a few weeks’ time I’ll be getting on another aeroplane. My point is that faith was a key part of what I was doing.  And what I will be doing: exercising faith again.

In fact, when you begin to think about it, faith is a part of everyday life and we barely give it a thought. And while faith can be blind, irrational, or misplaced, it rarely is. It seems pretty basic. So here’s the question: is religious faith different in some fundamental way from the kind of thing I’ve been talking about?

When I think about my Christian faith, I don’t think about it in the abstract. I think about what (or who) it’s in. Have I placed my faith in an unknowable mystery? No. I’ve place my faith primary in a person who lived one of the most scrutinised lives in all of history. How do I know about that life? It is recorded (several times over) in one of the most scrutinised books in all of history.  To be honest, just as I (and I would submit, you) have approached other aspects of life, I personally did not do all of the scrutinising myself. As with anything I’m being asked to entrust myself too (like aeroplanes) I’ve looked in detail at some things, left some things to others who have particular expertise, and never had any reason (note the use of the word “reason”) to scrutinise a whole other bunch of stuff. I suppose if I came to suspect that I’d placed my faith in the wrong object, or found I was being asked to simply trust things that seemed internally contradictory, then I’d resort to more scrutiny myself. But so far, this hasn’t been an issue. My exercise of faith in this context seems to be more an act of will, than a process of discovery and persuasion. I didn’t wait till all the “i’s” were dotted and “t’s” crossed. I took a decision and ran with it, just as I do in life in general. So far I have no reason to review the basic decision.

One other thought. Sometimes faith is placed in opposition to science. People talk about science vs faith, or the science/faith debate. Occasionally I do this myself. But in one way I actually find this a bit odd. Science involves buckets of faith on all sorts of levels. But that’s for another day. Trust me.