Paul Davies has created a stir with an op-ed piece in the New York Times, in which he claims that both religion and science are based on faith.
Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.
The article has inspired a wide variety of responses, both on Edge, where it's re-posted, and elsewhere—most of them scurrying to deflect the slur on science one way or another.
My own objection to his claim is less philosophical than most of the others. I simply don't think it makes any sense at all.
He begins by defining "faith" as "belief in the existence of something outside the universe". That is the strangest definition of faith I have ever heard. Usually the word either means "trust", as in the sentence, "I have faith in you," or, when used in debates about religion vs. science, it means believing something without evidence.
In the case of religion, there are a set of "facts" about God—his history, his preferences, his trinitarian (if you're a Christian) structure—which are believed on faith, in this last sense. That is, they are believed on the authority of tradition, without any solid evidence—indeed, what kind of evidence would you look for to prove that God comes in three parts?
In the case of science, various researchers and theorists, over time, have amassed a great deal of evidence that various aspects of the world behave in an orderly fashion. This has encouraged them to expect that further researches will uncover further order. You can call this expectation faith, if you like, but it is an entirely different thing than the religious variety.
It says nothing about what shape the final order will take, if it turns out to exist. Scientists aren't looking for evidence that the laws of physics are trinitarian. They are simply looking for further order where they have previously found order—in whatever form it may take.
Obviously, scientists are likely to expect that future discoveries will look very much like past ones—they are only human. But the history of science has already provided plenty of examples where this did not turn out to be the case, and those discoveries were part of the scientific enterprise.
After redefining the term "faith" to mean something entirely different from common usage, he proceeds to accuse science of depending on laws which are external to the universe, in the same way that God is external to the universe. This, also, makes no sense.
Religion—at least the relatively conservative religion which he seems to be referring to—makes God external to the world in a kind of quasi-physical manner. As Creator, God is, in some sense, supposed to actually exist outside of the world. If the world ceased to exist, God would go right on existing.
But the "laws" of science are actually descriptions of regularities in the world. Even if you embrace the idea of a multiverse, you are still talking about regularities within the multiverse. They are not external agents, acting on the universe from outside, but simply descriptions of how the universe acts.
His final conclusion, that any claim of science to be free of faith is bogus, is built on a misunderstanding of the the nature of science, and a misunderstanding of the meaning of "faith".
