vic said:
ArtGuy said:
... No, not really. The require the same burden of proof as for scientific hypotheses. They tend to consider faith a poor means of determining truth. I mean, if I were going to base my religious beliefs solely off what I could prove in a lab, I wouldn't be a Christian, either. Belief requires faith. Faith is not something atheists subscribe to. That's about it.
Doesn't it require some sort of faith that the ones who come up with the scientific hypotheses are correct in their assumptions?
It's not really the same thing. In a sense, it takes some measure of faith to even assume that reality is, well,
real, and that the whole of existence isn't just a big dream. But this sort of faith isn't really optional. You need to make certain basic assumptions to even be able to function - you need to assume that when you eat food, it will still sustain you. You need to assume that your apple won't explode when you bite into it. If you stopped having faith in these basic tenets, you'd basically have to curl into a ball and die, because that would be the only available alternative.
Faith in God is much more optional, at least superficially. If I assume God doesn't exist, what happens to me, right here, right now? Nothing. Nothing at all. It probably has implications for after I die, but for right now? No, not really. It's more akin to faith that there exists extraterrestrial life, or faith that we'll have flying cars in 50 years.
So what about faith in science? Where does that fit in? Well, it's much more similar to the first type. Science describes how the everyday world functions. It describes gravity, it describes the laws of motion, it describes how creatures function. It makes your television work. It makes the pill you take to cure an infection work. It makes every aspect of our day-to-day lives possible. You can't really get through a day without having faith that objects will still fall down, (gravity), that your TV will work when you turn it on (relativity), that the sun isn't going to blow up (astrophysics), and so on.
Beyond that, science is something that can be tested in a lab, either literally or metaphorically. It makes predictions, and we test those predictions. Special relativity predicts that if you make an object go really fast, time slows down, length contracts, and mass increases. After literally millions and millions of observations, those predictions have held up every time. So while it takes some measure of faith to presume that the rules won't suddenly change tomorrow, it doesn't take a
lot of faith, because the universe is a pretty ordered and regular place, by all measures. Moreover, these sorts of things are typically the domain of what a decent introductory course in college physics will allow you to experiment with directly.
Further, it's sort of a mischaracterization of science to assert that atheists have faith that it's true. Science has little to do with truth. We have a model of the atom that assumes that there exists a nucleus comprised of protons and neutrons; that the protons and neutrons are themselves comprised of three quarks each; that these nucleii are surrounded by electrons floating around in clouds at various energy levels. This may or may not be what truly goes on in an atom, but it doesn't much matter. The atom could be full of tiny ghosts that only pretend to be protons and neutrons, but that's irrelevant, because our model works. It gives repeatable results, and it explains the things we see in ways that are useful to us. So regardless of whether it's true, it's a useful model. That's all that matters.
To move over to evolution for a minute, it's pretty much the same thing. It's entirely possible that God created the universe 10 years ago and just made it look like it does now, and fabricated billions of years of history. But the hypotheses that scientists have formulated based on the assumption that evolutionary theory is the "truth" are repeatable, and they make predictions that can be verified. And those predictions have been shown to be true over and over again. They predict that if they dig down so far, they'll find fossils from this category, and then they dig, and presto!, that's what they find. The models are useful.
I suppose, then, the faith that one must have in order to believe that science is valid is simply the faith that scientists aren't either really dumb or systematically lying. It's possible that they are. Of course, you'd need to explain how their predictions have been used to actually manufacture new medical procedures and so on, so perhaps it doesn't take that much faith, after all.
The short answer, then, is that atheists are willing to grant a small amount of faith, on the same order as the amount of faith needed simply to get by in the world. Belief in science takes very little faith, because it tells us things that we can see with our own eyes, and measure with our own tools. Belief in God takes a large amount of faith, because God cannot be measured. Atheists aren't willing to grant that level of faith. It exceeds their faith-budget.
