Meditation 101: Religious and Scientific Faith

My perspective on the world is agnostic, secular and scientific.  From that perspective, I used to think that faith, as the belief in things unseen, only concerns religions. Religions require many beliefs in unseen things. We need faith in order to have beliefs about them, because there is no way of knowing the truth of statements about supernatural or paranormal entities. We cannot reliably detect supernatural beings by ordinary sensory or generally empirical means.  “Reliably” is the key term, since there is no lack of anecdotal testimony.  However, mere assertion does not make the anecdotes true. It takes faith to believe them with confidence.

More crucially, it takes faith to believe in the the existence of gods or a single God with supernatural powers and occult qualities. None of the proofs showing the existence of supernatural beings are uncontested. Therefore, though faith is necessary for belief in things unseen, it is not sufficient for knowledge. It is always possible to be skeptical about them.

I choose to be agnostic about things I cannot know, and this means that I must allow the bare logical possibility of the existence of Divine Being. However, advocating faith in them seemed to me a trick to derive knowledge from sheer belief. Somehow people of religious faith are simply making an elementary epistemological mistake. The mistake is to think that faith converts what is an objective uncertainty into unshakable knowledge.  A proposition does not become true simply because a person believes it hard enough. It is always possible to be wrong about a belief, but this is not true of knowledge. I thought we could dissolve the claims of faith by giving everyone an elementary course in epistemology.  People only need to learn the distinction between knowledge and belief, and then they will see that their faith is simply the holding of uncertain beliefs with a subjective passion of conviction, not knowledge of a supernatural world. 

What a fool I was.  Though keeping the idea that faith does not provide knowledge of its objects, I came to realize that faith in things unseen belongs to human life. This applies as much to the secular/scientific person as to the religious person. Both operate on presuppositions that are ultimately unfounded and unknown.  Hume points the way in his account of inductive reasoning. He pointed out that while all our positive knowledge of the world is based on the proposition that the future will be like the past, we cannot know this for certain. Things were very different just after the Big Bang than they are now, and they may become different again in the future. We just do not know how different the future will be..

One article of scientific faith is that the universe is predictable, and that the human mind has powers enough to understand it to a large extent. The human mind is limited by space, time, and the bounds of sense. These limits enclose what we call the 'natural' world; namely, a universe that is best understood through empirical, testable, scientific inquiry.

Another article of scientific faith, articulated by Kant, is that we can discover increasingly simple and unified sets of physical laws, and an increasingly complete scientific theory of the workings of the universe. There is no way that we can know this a priori. Nevertheless, looking for the unities and identities behind seemingly disparate and complex phenomena is what science does, based on hunches and considerable experience of progress in that direction. Kant called this a practical postulate of Pure Reason. It is an operational principle that allows scientific investigations to proceed. There would no reason to investigate nature if we thought from the get-go that the universe is ultimately a meaningless chaos.

It follows that we must all have faith in things unseen that we cannot ultimately know. Given this, how do religious and scientific faith differ? One important difference is that religious faith sees itself as establishing supernatural truths, while scientific faith does not.   Scientific faith rests content with reasonably certain beliefs about the world that are theoretically open to correction.  Religious faith remains viable only on the assumption that religious truth exists and can be confirmed by faith. Scientific faith remains viable even realizing that it must operate on ultimately unfounded assumptions. Or, to put is another way, there is a different attitude toward what faith can accomplish. Both religion and science begin with beliefs. In the first case, faith turns belief into religious knowledge. In second case, faith leaves us in the realm of belief. The 'faith-based' beliefs of science merely play an operational role in the search for better and better theories.

We can now understand another difference between religious and scientific faith. This is the characteristic dogmatism of religion and the skepticism of science.  It makes sense that religion is dogmatic, since it is convinced of supernatural truths through the power of faith. Other views cannot be allowed as competitors, for when one possesses the truth, any change in belief will mark a slide into apostasy and falsehood. Scientific faith does not have to commit itself to any particular metaphysical  view, and can thus remain skeptical while putting its provisional faith to work achieving such significant, though limited, progress as we are able to make.