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.