An idea probably not worth the pixels it's written in.

[sakon76]

So, despite my father thinking that it's a stupid idea**, I've lately been pondering the interconnectedness of social faith, religious faith, and scientific faith, and trying to figure out how they're all related to one another.

If social faith is basically a trust of other people to do what society deems right, like, say, keep their oncoming vehicle on the other side of the divider from yours, tell the truth, pay taxes, not kill people, and basically make the world a surviveable place, then doesn't that feed into scientific faith? Which for the purposes of this train of thought I'm defining as "science/scientists telling us the truth." Because honestly? I've never seen a single atom. I can't tell you that black holes exist, never having encountered one. And quantum mechanics? I'm blindly trusting what I'm told here. Which sounds an awful lot like religious faith, doesn't it? Trusting that your what your religious leader and religious tome of choice tell you are The Truth.

So... in some way, social and religious faith probably coexisted for a long long time before humanity came into an age of technological progresses (which I do not mean as "post-industrial revolution," BTW; science has been happening a lot longer than that), during which scientific faith has arisen from the framework of religious faith and is now duking it out with that human faith in forces invisible and ineffable. Does one necessarily have to win out over the other? Can the old and the new coexist?

Just one of those thoughts that I blindly trip across once in a while and then spend months or years trying to consider, incorporate, and solve to my own personal satisfaction if no one else's. Faith, after all, being as much a personal thing as a societal thing. And, yes, this was stumbled across in the quest to write fanfiction. The older I get, the bigger, deeper, and scarier (to me at least, in how they challenge me and change my life and beliefs) my themes become. So maybe writing is my way to find a better personhood?

**For reference, my father refers to science as Fact, which inclines me to believe that, as so often occurs, he and I are having two different conversations entirely; to me, science falls a bit more toward Theory and I was talking about philosophy and psychology anyway. But then this schism is to be expected: he is an engineer and I am a dreamer and thus, arguably, a disappointment.

Comments

[toothycat]

I'm not sure if it counts as 'scientific faith' as such, but I'm a scientist and a Christian, and I know plenty of other people who are scientists and hold to a religion, so they can coexist.
However, I don't think that's quite the same thing - what your use of 'scientific faith' sounds like is what I do every time I cite a paper. I'm trusting that the scientists who wrote that paper got it right, just as you trust that the people who talk about atoms are correct. It works because of the peer review process, and when it does go wrong, it self corrects, eventually. It's an important part of science, but not the whole.

Faith is very personal, yes, but it is also a community thing. Westerners tend to go for the individual thing; generally, African communities, for example, are much less individualistic. I don't think you can be a Christian alone. It's not set up to be that way, and the way I see it and the way most Westerners see it is the result of an individualistic culture. Christianity ought to be lived out in community.
I'm not sure if that's what you meant when you said 'faith is personal as much as societal', though, so if it is and I've misunderstood, sorry ^^;;

[haamel.livejournal.com]

Science is not "fact" in the unassailable, philosophical sense. It is a system of theories that explain the way the physical world works and how it can be interacted with. To be worth dignifying as "Science", these theories must be validatable through experiment - anything that cannot be experimentally verified is not science, but philosophy or religion. Because every conceivable(*) experiment is limited in scope and precision, every scientific theory is necessarily incomplete. Stated differently, any scientific theory is only useful within a regime it well describes. Newton's theory of classical gravitation, though known to be incomplete, is still quite useful for describing the motion of everyday objects.

If there is such a thing as "scientific faith", its most important article is the belief in repeatability: that if the universe obeys some principle at one point in spacetime, it obeys it at all points in spacetime. There is no known, transcendental reason why this must be so, and the truest definitions of "supernatural" phenomena amount to isolated "violations" of repeatable physical law. Nevertheless, repeatability is indispensible to the concept of scientific testability: it is not "science" if you can produce an effect I cannot using the same method. This point is usually taken for granted.

A "religious theory" is a theory which has no known method of validation or repudiation, but which is given credence anyway. Many topics move from philosophy ("Why do the heavens move?") to the religious ("They move at God's pleasure") to the scientific ("They actually move under the influence of gravity in the following manner"). Friction between science and religion is usually the result of scientists deriding untestable beliefs, or the religious not accepting a scientific explanation for a topic from their faith. It is possible to hold both scientific and relgious convictions without contradiction, so long as the two do not overlap.

(*)Information theory sits at the intersection of science and pure mathematics, and includes a description of how much energy is required to represent symbols. All "descriptions" of scientific theory are necessarily symbolic, and must be represented by an equivalent amount of energy, or what is the same thing, matter. If there is a finite amount of matter-energy in the universe, then there is a finite extent to any theory constructable within the universe, including a theory describing the workings of the unvierse itself. Worse, Godel's landmark Incompleteness Theorems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompleteness_theorem) prove that any interesting symbolic system, like science, will never be able to answer all the questions it can pose. This is arguably the most profound result in the entire history of theoretical inquiry.

[sakon76.livejournal.com]

No, that's pretty much exactly what I meant by that statement. ^_^

I sometimes wonder if it's harder to have a faith system in place or not. I do not count myself as a Christian, for all that I try to live by "Christian" values (quote marks there because many other religions share the same values) because they seem like good ones to me. Which means that I struggle to figure out what I do believe in (possibly something closer to Buddhism...). But at the same time I don't wish to make light of the experiences of those who do have a religious framework, because there's no reason that their faith is any less of a struggle than mine.

I suspect that in the end it all comes down to the same thing: "Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water." So I guess my faith comes down to that someday I'll figure it out, and in the meantime, I should do as best I can. Nirvana, to the right frame of mind, can be found in peeling potatoes.

[toothycat]

Many topics move from philosophy ("Why do the heavens move?") to the religious ("They move at God's pleasure") to the scientific ("They actually move under the influence of gravity in the following manner").

The way I see it, both answers could be true. One is an answer to a 'why' question, the other an answer to 'how'.
Not all such questions split up so neatly, but science and religion are looking at the same thing but for different reasons and asking different questions. It's not surprising people think they conflict, but they don't have to (obviously, if you're going to treat the Bible, say, as a scientific textbook you're going to have problems, but that's not what it is so to my mind, that's a mis-use of it).

[branna.livejournal.com]

More than that, true scientific theories must have predictive power. I.e. to be fully validated, a new theory must not only fit known data, but must successfully predict some experimentally measurable phenomenon that hadn't yet been observed/measured at the time the theory was formulated.

And as someone else pointed out, while I as a scientist extend a certain measure of trust to my scientific peers where experimental results are concerned, that trust is never absolute. I don't take it on faith that they are right. I scrutinize whatever I can of their methods, not only in performing the experiment but in evaluating and assigning their errors. I also compare that result to other experiments (some identical, some similar but subject to different sources of errors).

If there is faith there, it's a faith that is subject to constant revision and review. So my question is, is it faith if the continued absence of supporting evidence leads you to doubt or question it? Is it faith if the presence of contradictory evidence will lead you to abandon it entirely?

[mmouse15.livejournal.com]

And to add to all of this, as a graduate of an engineering school, I can see why there might be a conflict between your father's views and yours. An engineer, unlike someone in the theoritical fields, is actually measuring known, quantifiable things, such as the span of a bridge, the load of a surface, the fit between gears, or some such. And it is so easy for an engineer to forget that life is not as measurable as his/her career. I run into it all the time. I went into a field that is not as measurable as many other engineering fields (I went into geology), and I can have an engineer sputtering like a bad motor in under 10 minutes by pointing out all the stuff I don't know and can't quantify, but that I have to take into account to do my job.

I also agree with you. Science is a series of theories. Darwin's theory, for example, has much supporting evidence and has held up to many tests over 150 years, but it is still a theory, not a fact. Theories explain the existing phenomena, but may be disproved by new discoveries (Thompson's 'plum pudding' atomic model, anyone?). A way we explain this is the paradigm idea, best shown by Galileo's (and Copernicus') theory of planetary revolution. Before Galileo, the Ptolemaic model of the solar system was used and supported. Very soon after Galileo's theory was published, the Ptolemaic model collapsed and people couldn't understand it. There had been such a mental shift of understanding that the old system couldn't even be explained 50 years later. And so science and religious faith have lurched forward, each moving the other along and asking different questions, but locked in step together.

And science is not engineering, and my FIL would have said that your father was not a wise man, since he doesn't know when he doesn't know something but behaves as if he does and can bluster his way through...

[sakon76.livejournal.com]

*shrug* My dad has a certain mindset that runs in our family... his father-in-law, my grandfather, was the same way, and so is my younger sister. I'm not, and though I love my father very much, I was always very conscious of not wanting to marry someone like him, and didn't. I usually ascribe it to "different people see the universe in different ways," and being his daughter is actually very helpful for my writing and development in general.