Reader Paul Suliin points me at a post at Pharyngula about the election of Katharine Jefferts Schori as presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. Beyond the "Yay, Episcopalians!" it prompted from me (she was trained as an oceanographer!), the post has some interesting things going on in the comments, where commenters have been discussing whether the reason, tradition, and scripture that play a role in Protestant sects might have analogs in science. My answer?
Kind of.
Reason is the one element that no scientist will argue isn't part of science. Some may wonder whether reason plays any role in religion, but I think you can make the case that it does. (For example, figuring out how to treat someone as you would want to be treated -- if you were that person -- requires the exercise of reason.)
Tradition also plays a role in science. What are useful questions to ask in this field? What are promising experimental and computational techniques for solving those problems? What should a good explanation of X look like? How do we choose between competing accounts of X? These are all parts of the "tradition" of a scientific field. Tradition, of course, is a guide more than a limit; it gets updated, and scientists may find it useful to break with tradition, although they will usually need to offer persuasive reasons to get others to follow them away from "what has worked".
Scripture is probably the hardest piece of the formula to identify as being part of science. Is scripture the scientific literature (which is to say, the testimony of other scientists, shared with the community of science, about what they have observed and how they have interpreted it)? Or is "scripture" here "The Book of Nature" -- that is, the world itself and all the phenomena in it? The best analogy here has a lot to do with what "scripture" is supposed to indicate on the religion side. If scripture is the testimony of early members of the community (testimony that might not be accurate), science's scripture is the literature (where mistakes can be made and people might even by lying). If scripture is The Word, science's scripture is composed of the phenomena -- how things are really, but not always easy to interpret correctly.
There was something like a suggestion in the comments that science can get by on reason alone. But it seems like your wits (and your sense organs) can usually benefit from the experiences of others in the community, which is why scientists communicate their results to each other, as well as why graduate programs and apprenticeships are useful ways to train new scientists. It does seem likely, though, that reason imposes more constraints on the tradition and scripture of science than it does on the tradition and scripture of a religion.
What's the point of drawing a comparison like this? Some people claim that science is completely different from religion, while others argue that science is itself just another religion. I don't think either of these extremes is accurate.
If I may quote an earlier time-slice of myself, here are some thoughts about where science needs something beyond reason:
Of course scientific theories bring some philosophy with them. You think the data we collect today can help us make good predictions about what will happen tomorrow? That reflects a metaphysical commitment you have about what kind of universe you're living in. And there's nothing wrong with having that commitment. Indeed, it's what helps some of us get out of bed in the morning. You want to show me the analysis that shows your results are statistically significant? Fine, but don't forget that the claim of statistical significance rests on metaphysical commitments about the normal distribution of data in the bit of the world you're studying. If you didn't start with some metaphysical hunches, there would be no way to do any science.
But, clearly, there is a difference between doing this and jumping into a "philosophical theory" of [a more religious] sort ... And here, let me be the millionth person to point out that there is an important distinction between what one takes up as a methodological strategy and what one takes on as a metaphysical commitment. To [some], the fact that God is not mentioned anywhere in evolutionary theory is equivalent to biologists saying they're committed to the non-existence of God. To biologists, on the other hand, the non-mention of God reflects a methodological commitment to explain phenomena in the natural world by pointing to natural causes. Saying, "I'm only going to accept causes of types X, Y, and Z in explanations of this sort of phenomena" is not the same as saying, "There's nothing there but causes of types X, Y, and Z." If, as I pour a flask of water on a spoonful of table salt, I dance the tarantella, it would be silly to accuse the chemist, who explains why the salt dissolved by pointing to the structure of the salt and the structure of the water, of denying the existence of the tarantella. Clearly, the tarantella exists, but the chemist doesn't need it to explain why the salt dissolved.
(Occam's razor? Also philosophical. Don't let it freak you out.)
The deal with science -- the thing that makes it different from some "philosophical theories" you might worry about -- it that there's a serious attempt to do the job of describing, explaining, and manipulating the universe with a relatively lean set of metaphysical commitments, and to keep many of the commitments methodological. If you're in the business of using information from the observables, there are many junctures where the evidence is not going to tell you for certain whether P is true or not-P is true. There has to be a sensible way to deal with, or to bracket, the question of P so that science doesn't grind to a halt while you wait around for more evidence. Encounter a phenomenon that you're not sure is explainable in terms of any of the theories or data you have at the ready? You can respond by throwing your hands up and hypothesizing, "A wizard did it!", or you can dig in and see whether further investigation of the phenomenon will yield an explanation. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. In cases where it does not, science is still driven by a commitment to build an explanation in terms of stuff in the natural world, despite the fact that we may have to reframe our understanding of that natural world in fairly significant ways.
One last thing on this subject, regarding faith: When people talk about religion, lots of times faith is described as belief that runs counter to what reason (and the observables) tells you. This kind of faith, obviously, doesn't sit so well with scientists, who are trying to use what they can observe and their powers of reason to make sense of the world. But faith can also describe beliefs people form where reason and the empirical evidence can't tell you what to believe. This includes a lot of hunches scientists lean on pretty heavily -- for example, that the laws of nature won't suddenly change next Tuesday. Even though, come next Tuesday, the facts may require us to update this belief, I'm willing to bet that this belief has more "oomph" than a mere methodological commitment. It really feels like we live in a world with stable laws of nature. If next Tuesday things in the lab behave radically different, my first response is going to be that something is wrong with my equipment or reagents -- or even with my eyes. To decide that the universe has suddenly gone on a bender goes so counter to the scientist's deeply held assumptions that it requires pretty strong proof.
I don't think there's any problem with scientists having this kind of faith. Unless you start with some general assumptions, it's hard to draw any conclusions from even the richest data set. And I don't think the kind of faith scientists have (in a fairly regular universe about which we can learn a lot by observing and experimenting) makes science a religion. But I'm interested to see whether you all think these are reasonable parallels to draw -- and, if so, whether they make you uneasy.
I think there is sometimes a pervasive belief among scientists that all religion, without qualification, constitutes truth that runs counter to experience. Though I am an atheist, I don't think this is always the case.
There are some very reasonable maxims in religion that religious people would argue conform to a common sense view of the universe. Likewise, people do not always believe religious stories because they are the revealed truth; sometimes they believe them because they find them true in experience.
William James said that, "Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible."
From that point about view that vast majority of things we study involve faith. I have faith that my experiments will conform some coherent model. I have faith that man is understandable and rational. As much as we hate to admit it -- because it does lend credibility to people like Ann Coulter -- science does involve a degree of faith.
Yes! Your discussion of "faith that the world is consistent" is something I've been trying to get across in comments on several blogs. But you've said it better than I ever managed....
This reminds me of the old question of 'Why is the water boiling'? You can talk about how the heat imparted to the water is being absorbed by the molecules as energy enabling them to break their bonds and be released as steam, or you can say 'Because Auntie wants a cup of tea'. Two different explanations, both true, both involving different, not contradictory, views.
Good stuff.
What I like about the water boiling question is that it can lead us to examine how we interact with people who have different interests and different expectations.
Something I've been thinking about lately is this:
Do some scientists demonstrate any behaviors that might look like religious behavior from the point of view of a nonscientist?
Is that a hypothesis that might explain how nonscientists react to some scientists' statements?
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I don't think that religion is anti-science, or that science is just a religion. I think they operate in different spheres of knowledge. Religion deals with subjective knowledge, and science with objective knowledge.
For this reason I don't think it's possible for them to come into conflict, as long as that demarcation is recalled and maintained. Apparent conflicts seem to result either when a religious person asserts the objective truth of their belief, or when a scientist declares that religion is false or inferior because it is subjective. Both of these have their root in the same idea: the social convention that objective knowledge and experience are inherently more valuable than subjective knowledge and experience. I've begun using "scientism" as a label for that belief, and you can find it in both religion and science.
I think that faith crosses lines: it's used in both fields of knowledge, though more in religion. Faith is what we use whenever we step across the gap between what we can prove conclusively and what we choose to believe.