Science and Faith

M. Z.
Hi. It is simple if be logical. All live creatures are subjective. That mean they are driven by they own subjective representations about the World accessible to them. This simple to follow statement didn't left any place to any entity which supposed to possessing capability to direct drive of any live creature.

On another side religious believes is very important tools to drive society. So leave them alone and don't disturb. It's easy to survive with believes.

Faith is the company we need when we are lonely; it is the support we need when we lack strength, and the illusion that keeps us optimistic in all those uncertain moments. The less we know the more faith we need. Faith is an acceptable and important stepping stone in our journey of evolution as a species and as individuals. But faith does reveal that we are ignorant and vulnerable and so although an admirable quality that humans posses, it should not be promoted as a higher/holy quality. Faith certainly does not elevate us, closer to anything greater than a homo sapiens. Faith is the just a quality of an adolescent human species, the evolution of primal instinct which animals and cavemen relied on. We have relied on faith so long that we feel we have arrived and have elevated it, but our journey of evolution is far from over. As faith replaced primal instinct, so a combination of strength, knowledge and acceptance (science) will replace faith. In this I have faith. Peace.

P.S. If our collective adolescent like rage or neglect does`nt destroy our species first.

P.P.S. I just realized if we use faith to fill the gaps and to explain the unknown (GOD) effectively replacing real knowledge, then we run the risk that the more faith we have the less we need to know about what is real and this would be counter evolutionary.

A belief is merely something that one holds to be true or correct - that's it. Simple enough, right?

Well, how do you get your beliefs? This is where the problems arise.

Science is a system for coming up with beliefs (the product of science, be it facts, theories, educated guesses). There are many other ways of coming up with belief systems, from rolling dice to intuition to personal experiences to stories codified into bodies of knowledge. None of these methods are useless - they are still around because they provided some benefit to their host, even if it was something as simple as comfort.

Major world religions have a firmly established base of beliefs arrived at through a dizzying array of methods. Science has a much more massive base of beliefs arrived at through one method and one method only: observation. In other words, science requires of all of its beliefs that they match a certain standard of proof and verifiability. You'll find that science hasn't got a lot to say about things like God because those things are not verifiable. Other belief systems which use different standards will of course have different perspectives.

There will always be a conflict between science and any other belief system that does not use the same standards and methods as science for validating beliefs. The conflict is not a problem - it's natural. Someone, someday, might come up with a better system than science and science should lose such a conflict. The problems arise when one chooses to believe that which contradicts the scientifically verifiable (such as evolution, or the age of the earth and universe, for example).

Belief that is not based on evidence is called faith by definition. Faith is very nearly the opposite of how science draws its conclusions. Science requires evidence, faith *requires* no evidence or contradicting evidence. I'd say that's the textbook definition of incompatibility.

The reason science wins all of its battles with other belief systems is a very simple one. Science provides far greater tangible, real world benefits to its host (medicine, rational thinking, shiny toys, massive economic potential, more pleasant living environments, etc). Any area that becomes hostile to science will inevitably fall behind areas that are friendly in all the areas where science excels.

One would be hard pressed to find any area where science provides tangible benefits *and* is still questioned. The only areas where science faces these kinds of faith-based public challenges are areas that are, for most people, esoteric and inapplicable to their lives. The age of the earth, or the mechanisms for evolution, provide almost no value and no meaning whatsoever for people not working in fields directly related to that knowledge - and most people in the world are not scientists.

Instead, those ideas come to them not in some useful form like medicine or air conditioning, but in the form of an outside perspective that directly threatens the core of their other belief systems - belief systems which, for most people, provide a great deal of tangible benefits, the chief of which being the hope that death is not the end of the line and the comfort of knowing their loved ones aren't really gone. Attacks on christianity are perceived on a base level as an attack against the host's immortality. The basic fact that the immortality is an illusion is only obvious to those who base their beliefs in reality - in other words, atheists, agnostics, but definitely not most major world religions. Both sides see their perspectives as intuitively, bluntly obvious. We all know what kind of behavior that kind of argument brings out in people... the window of time where either side is willing to actually listen to the other will be brief in any such exchange.

It's an interesting conflict, and not one that science can actually win in a straight-up fight for a change, because it isn't bringing any benefits to the table for these people to replace the imagined ones it stands to strip away. The only way science can win that war is by educating the young it can reach out of faith-based thinking, and waiting around for everyone else to die of old age. That's a pretty poor solution.

Maybe a better question would be, "What comfort and hope for the future can science bring to the table that could ever compete with religion?" Are we all really ready to give up on the idea of defeating death? Do we really know enough about the universe to rule out such a thing, even for those who have already left us?

Science and faith are incompatible. Science and all of the benefits that are brought to us by religions and other belief systems need not be.