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The Faith of the Scientist
Sep. 25th, 2009 05:14 pmOr, How Roger Scruton has Missed The Boat in This Article
Everyone who engages in this type of debate sooner or later decides to argue why raising children in their own faith, or at least some faith, is preferable to the perceived alternative. Both Scruton and the person he was responding to, Danny Postel, have fallen victim to this, though Postel wonders if it's an ill-conceived notion.
The problem is that in rebutting Postel's article, Scruton has made the mistake of presuming science to be devoid of faith, and has therefore postulated that in order to be raised with faith, children must be raised with religion. Postel doesn't clearly articulate the point of view I suspect he was aiming for, so I will.
The first quote to cause me problems was this one: It seems to me that humanists should wake up to this point, and be careful when they seek to deprive their children of enchantment, or to replace their spontaneous fantasies with the cold hard facts of empirical science.
To be blunt, anyone who sees in science only cold hard facts lacks either imagination, the ability to synthesize, or the will to use one or the other. Faith is integral to science, but it's not faith in anything that could be called God. It's not even really faith in humans, except in the sense that we are the vehicle for its discoveries. It's faith in the natural universe as a knowable entity, as something we can (or will eventually be able to) wrap our brains around, understand, and ask more questions about. If the fundamental question of religion is "What is truth?" then the fundamental question of science is, "What happens if?"
In the scientific method, humans have developed a way to answer that question, test the answer for its validity, and from that answer develop new questions. It looks like cold hard facts to those who stop with the answers generated, but to someone with the desire to follow each train of thought further than it has been followed before, it requires immense creativity and faith. The scientist needs to believe first that there is an answer; second that he will recognize it when he sees it, and be able to comprehend it; third that the answer will lead to more questions; fourth that all the answers will either fit in with the paradigm we work with currently to understand natural laws, or alternatively lead to the development of an entirely new paradigm. (Imagine the excitement of the first person to realize that the atmosphere ends, that gravity holds it in place, and that beyond is not ether but vacuum. That person created a paradigm shift in science, made a discovery that changed everything we thought we knew about the sky.)
Scruton goes on to make the fundamental error of the non-scientifically-minded person: he states that because something is unknown, it is a void destined to remain unfilled, and furthermore that it needs to be filled with some form of certainty. The point he's missed is that a scientific worldview doesn't see a scary, formless void where faith should be; it sees unanswered questions, and it sees questions to ask and pursue. If nobody put us here for a specific purpose, that doesn't stop us from the self-actualization of creating our own, and where better to start than in knowing our universe? The existence of the void is its own purpose, and our job is to push our understanding out into it.
The video I posted this morning is a reworking of a variety of quotes, mostly by Carl Sagan. He was a scientist, but he was also an author and a creative force. He spent his life reaching his brain into the cosmos and into the human psyche, outward and inward. The tribute video is really an anthem to the faith of the scientist. (I would love to see an arrangement in SATB for a Unitarian choir.) It expresses his faith that there is a universe of elegant truths still awaiting discovery, and that we are poised to discover them.
I'm not sure if that kind of faith is at odds with traditional faith; I believe it's at odds with the more dogmatic aspects of religion but not necessarily with the faiths themselves. I do know that when scientifically-minded people give in to the notion that faith and science don't mix, they're ceding ground where they should hold it. Science does not eliminate faith; it directs it both outwards and inwards, into the facts beyond the facts we know, into possibilities and probabilities that will keep us interested and exploring for the duration of the human race.
Teaching a scientific worldview to children does not mean teaching them to doubt. It means teaching them to have faith in the ability of the human brain to make sense of its universe in all its beauty - however vast that might be. In this, Scruton was absolutely right: the doubting comes later, and is conquered eventually by the human will to search for truth. The scientist has this much in common with the Unitarian: the answer is to question.
Everyone who engages in this type of debate sooner or later decides to argue why raising children in their own faith, or at least some faith, is preferable to the perceived alternative. Both Scruton and the person he was responding to, Danny Postel, have fallen victim to this, though Postel wonders if it's an ill-conceived notion.
The problem is that in rebutting Postel's article, Scruton has made the mistake of presuming science to be devoid of faith, and has therefore postulated that in order to be raised with faith, children must be raised with religion. Postel doesn't clearly articulate the point of view I suspect he was aiming for, so I will.
The first quote to cause me problems was this one: It seems to me that humanists should wake up to this point, and be careful when they seek to deprive their children of enchantment, or to replace their spontaneous fantasies with the cold hard facts of empirical science.
To be blunt, anyone who sees in science only cold hard facts lacks either imagination, the ability to synthesize, or the will to use one or the other. Faith is integral to science, but it's not faith in anything that could be called God. It's not even really faith in humans, except in the sense that we are the vehicle for its discoveries. It's faith in the natural universe as a knowable entity, as something we can (or will eventually be able to) wrap our brains around, understand, and ask more questions about. If the fundamental question of religion is "What is truth?" then the fundamental question of science is, "What happens if?"
In the scientific method, humans have developed a way to answer that question, test the answer for its validity, and from that answer develop new questions. It looks like cold hard facts to those who stop with the answers generated, but to someone with the desire to follow each train of thought further than it has been followed before, it requires immense creativity and faith. The scientist needs to believe first that there is an answer; second that he will recognize it when he sees it, and be able to comprehend it; third that the answer will lead to more questions; fourth that all the answers will either fit in with the paradigm we work with currently to understand natural laws, or alternatively lead to the development of an entirely new paradigm. (Imagine the excitement of the first person to realize that the atmosphere ends, that gravity holds it in place, and that beyond is not ether but vacuum. That person created a paradigm shift in science, made a discovery that changed everything we thought we knew about the sky.)
Scruton goes on to make the fundamental error of the non-scientifically-minded person: he states that because something is unknown, it is a void destined to remain unfilled, and furthermore that it needs to be filled with some form of certainty. The point he's missed is that a scientific worldview doesn't see a scary, formless void where faith should be; it sees unanswered questions, and it sees questions to ask and pursue. If nobody put us here for a specific purpose, that doesn't stop us from the self-actualization of creating our own, and where better to start than in knowing our universe? The existence of the void is its own purpose, and our job is to push our understanding out into it.
The video I posted this morning is a reworking of a variety of quotes, mostly by Carl Sagan. He was a scientist, but he was also an author and a creative force. He spent his life reaching his brain into the cosmos and into the human psyche, outward and inward. The tribute video is really an anthem to the faith of the scientist. (I would love to see an arrangement in SATB for a Unitarian choir.) It expresses his faith that there is a universe of elegant truths still awaiting discovery, and that we are poised to discover them.
I'm not sure if that kind of faith is at odds with traditional faith; I believe it's at odds with the more dogmatic aspects of religion but not necessarily with the faiths themselves. I do know that when scientifically-minded people give in to the notion that faith and science don't mix, they're ceding ground where they should hold it. Science does not eliminate faith; it directs it both outwards and inwards, into the facts beyond the facts we know, into possibilities and probabilities that will keep us interested and exploring for the duration of the human race.
Teaching a scientific worldview to children does not mean teaching them to doubt. It means teaching them to have faith in the ability of the human brain to make sense of its universe in all its beauty - however vast that might be. In this, Scruton was absolutely right: the doubting comes later, and is conquered eventually by the human will to search for truth. The scientist has this much in common with the Unitarian: the answer is to question.
