Not That Kind of Faith, the Other Kind
And then this review of books on science and religion. This ploy again:
Nowadays, when legislation supporting promising scientific research falls to religious opposition…scientists have to be brave to talk about religion. Not to denounce it, but to embrace it. That is what Francis S. Collins, Owen Gingerich and Joan Roughgarden have done in new books, taking up one side of the stormy argument over whether faith in God can coexist with faith in the scientific method.
Stop right there. That’s the same equivocation Mary Gordon used at that ‘Faith and Reason’ conference.
Without faith we would be paralyzed. We believe that all men are created equal. That our mothers, or at least our dogs, love us. That the number four bus will eventually come, all these represent a belief in the unseen.
Faith in God is not the same kind of faith as faith in ‘the scientific method’ just as none of Gordon’s cited versions of faith are straightforwardly ‘belief in the unseen’. There is an immense amount of evidence that ‘the scientific method’ works, so belief that it works is not the same kind of belief as belief that God exists, for which there is no real evidence at all. It’s sly and tricksy to pretend the two things are the same kind of thing.
PZ has a great post on the review at Pharungula.
I’m with you — I hate that sort of equivocation. If you can explain what kind of event or evidence would cause you to change your mind, I would call that kind of belief something other than ‘faith.’ Pragmatic reliance, perhaps, or confidence, or hope, or any one of a number of things which don’t try to tap into the wellspring of religious certainty. You MUST try to keep that kind of faith, or it’s not faith — the “substance of things hoped for, evidence of things not seen.” It becomes falsifiable.
Something like “faith in the value of liberty” is only like “faith in the existence of God” if you would be willing to explain slavery and tyranny as freedom in disguise.
This attempt to knock everything down to the same level of cluelessness (“your faith that your car is in the garage when you can’t see it is just like my faith that God exists even though I can’t see *Him*”) obscures the nuanced meanings of the words “faith.” As you say, it’s sly. And tricksy.
Faith isn’t thinking that your car is in the garage when you’re not looking at it. It’s when you look in the garage, see that it’s empty, and insist that no, it really is there — just not in a shallow material sense.
Mary Gordon seems to be conflating faith and logical inference. Isn’t it amazing the way theists trot out the same arguments over and over, always assuming they’ve made a profound or challenging contribution?
As a side issue, I would place ‘all men are created equal’ firmly in the category of faith. It seems to me to be the most vacuous of cherished American notions. But it is hardly surprising, as this is claimed in the context of the belief in a ‘creator’ who supposedly bestows ‘unalienable rights’.
Blast it, this is so dishonest and disingenuoius – there is a world of difference in saying “I have every faith in the hospital helping my mate recover from his illness, as it is commonly and easily treated, and they are good” and saying “My faith saved me, unlike the rest of my block, from Katrina”. And yet they put the arguments on the same level. What kind of intellectual slums do their arguments live in ?
Nick,
The same intellectual slums which bred; ‘Evolution is only a theory …’ and ‘Atheism is a sort of religion…’
The annoying thing is that at least some of the people trying to palm off this phoney intellectual currency know what they are doing but hope to slip into circulation anyway.
Don – I have a JW friend who gave me that “evoution’s only a theory” malarkey. I replied, so is ID/7th day adventism/creationsm, it’s just that my theory has billions of interconnected bits of accumulated data collated as evidence. Those other theories have no evidence whatsoever.
My own favoured response to that is that evolution is not a theory, it is an observable fact. Like gravity.
The Theory of Evolution is a scientifically rigorous process of constructing a coherent framework which accomodates the facts. It does not imply uncertainty about the fact of evolution.
“As a side issue, I would place ‘all men are created equal’ firmly in the category of faith. It seems to me to be the most vacuous of cherished American notions.”
If taken literally, sure. But as I said in the previous N&C on Gordon, I don’t think most Murkans (now) do take it literally – I think they take it as a flowery way of saying something like ‘all people should be treated equally before the law and in various other ways, though not in all ways.’ The US isn’t really a terribly egalitarian society, except in political rhetoric, where ‘elitism’ (meaning eating sushi, being an atheist, etc) is the worst crime on the books.