Why Scientists Have To Be Faithful

I suppose most scientists would be horrified by my claim that the scientific enterprise itself is solidly based on certain principles of faith. This is largely because the word 'faith' has come to mean 'belief in something for which there is no evidence'. Though I myself do not think that this is a good definition of the term 'faith', I shall nevertheless use this very definition and show why scientists themselves not only do, but also must, operate with a faith of precisely this nature.

(A) The Uniformity of Nature : At the heart of the scientific business is the presupposition that goes by the name of 'uniformity of nature', which states that the future will be like the past. So regularly do we use this presumption while going about the job of 'doing' science that we easily overlook the fact that this is precisely a sort of 'faith', for it is hard to think of what could possibly count as hard evidence for it. This presumption of the uniformity of nature is rather an axiomatic foundation for science, and being so it cannot be 'proved' in a non-circular manner, that is, without assuming the truth of what we are supposed to prove. You may very well want to believe that the world tomorrow will be very much the same as the world described by physics today, but this belief is, strictly speaking, not a mathematical conclusion but an article of 'faith'.

(B) The Universality of Description : Most scientific laws are said to be timelessly true, but strictly speaking this is a presumption and not the outcome of a rigorous proof. For example, why do we assume that the law of gravitation will hold good in all the distant galaxies in the universe though nobody has ever been to those galaxies and empirically 'verified' the law of gravitation there? Similarly, think of the law of conservation of momentum : one can only presume that this law is universally valid in all times and all places. The statement that scientific laws are universally/timelessly valid is therefore not an empirical datum but an article of 'faith', since there is no hard evidence for this presumption.

(C) The Comprehensibility of Nature : This is another fundamental presupposition that guides scientific activity which is that the natural world is indeed comprehensible to us. In fact, we have absorbed this presumption so deeply into ourselves that it is often hard for us to see it for what it is --- a presumption, nothing more, nothing less. To see why this is so, consider what happens when we are unable to explain what caused a certain event X. We could have simply said, 'Oh, well, X just happened', and left the matter at that, but we do not do so and instead go on trying to find out what caused it. To do this, however, we must operate with the background presumption that such causes can indeed be unearthed by the powers of the human mind. Once again the existence (or the non-existence) of these powers cannot be 'proved' in a rigorous manner by appealing to 'evidence'; it is a 'faith' in the potency (or incompetence) of rationality, a 'faith' that some people may or may not have.

(D) The Value of the Enterprise : There is yet a fourth fundamental presupposition that regulates scientific enquiry, and it is this proposition X : It is a valuable thing to practise science. It hardly needs to be pointed out in this age of ecologists, feminists, animal rights activists, post-colonial critics, cultural theorists, and peace fighters, that science has become a deeply contested territory. It is claimed that far from being 'value-neutral' science actually reflects the interests of multi-national private corporations which fund university departments to carry out research into those areas that can lead to the former's financial profit. So, for example, no industry would fund a department of quantum cosmology or string theory (there is no commercial profit to be gained out of these), while there is no dearth of industrial funding for departments of genetic engineering, on both sides of the Atlantic. In some of its forms, therefore, science itself has become just one more market commodity such that it is industrial concerns which now direct what areas are worthy of scientific attention, research, and exploration. Therefore, if we still wish to carry on with science despite these shocking exposes (which are based, incidentally, on quite hard evidence), we must have a sort of 'faith' in X, the 'faith' that will give us the courage to believe that in spite of all its associated and unintended dangers, science does remain a valuable pursuit of enquiry into the nature of reality. This, to repeat, is a presumption that some will accept, and others will reject.