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FOUR FAITH AND SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE Science cannot stand alone. We cannot believe its propositions without first believing in a great many other startling things, such as the existence of the external world, the reliability of our senses, memory and informants, and the validity of logic. If we do believe in these things, we already have a world far wider than that of science. —Mary Midgley1 Ours is a scientific age. This is perhaps still truer for some places on our planet than for others. But it is unquestionably true that scientific ideas, theories, technologies, approaches, and the like are reaching across cultural differences and having decisive impacts throughout the world. The historical development we now routinely label globalization has its roots not only in such things as the intricacies of worldwide economic interdependence and trade and the ease of travel and communication, but also in what increasingly is coming to be acknowledged as a shared scientific view of natural laws and physical processes, organic structures, and operations including those of the human brain, medical diagnosis and treatment, and the nature of the physical cosmos as a whole to the extent that it is amenable to scientific investigation. The particularities of culturally engrained outlooks and beliefs seem to be increasingly transcended by the global reach of scientific ones and by the technological achievements ongoing investigations of the natural sciences have helped to make possible. These developments have lent credence to the notion that the natural sciences are somehow above the fray of entrenched cultural differences and disagreements, and that they are “objective” in a way that other aspects of culture are not, mired as the latter are often thought to be in outmoded, idiosyncratic, culturally relative, and mere “subjective” modes of thought. Whereas it used to be assumed that religion is “the tie that binds,” that tie 61 62 FAITH AND REASON now is assumed in some quarters to be more fittingly and exclusively the natural sciences. It is further assumed by some that religion and science stand in stark opposition to one another. These same people often tend to identify religion with faith, and faith with a set of poorly supported or unsupportable beliefs, and thus to conclude that science and faith have nothing to do with one another. I have tried in earlier chapters to cast serious doubt on much of this picture of faith and of the natural sciences in their relations to faith. I do not deny the worldwide reach of the natural sciences, that this is a highly significant fact of our time, and that it may help to bring people of different cultures together. But I do reject the notions that the natural sciences alone are equipped to bind the world’s peoples together, that they are purely objective and culture-independent in a way that other aspects of cultures are not, that faith and religion come down to the same thing, and that science has or should have nothing to do with faith. I am particularly intent on defending the notion that all aspects of human thought, including the natural sciences, are dependent at crucial points on faith as I conceive it and that faith thus conceived is not the exclusive province of religion. A NARROW VIEW OF THE RELATIONS OF SCIENCE AND FAITH AND REASONS FOR OPPOSING IT The view of the relations of science and faith I oppose can be brought into clearer view by considering a version of it set forth and argued for by the philosopher Susan Haack in her book Defending Science within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism. She writes, I hadn’t forgotten that according to some philosophers, among them both Peirce and Popper, belief has no place in science. I agree that faith, in the religious sense, does not belong in science; though in their professional capacity scientists accept various claims as true, this usually is, or should be, tentative and always in principle revisable in the light of new evidence. (Haack 2007: 62) Several things should be noted about this statement. One is that Haack assumes that faith and belief are synonymous. A second is that faith is identified, at least for her purposes here, with religion. And a third is that scientific claims are said to be revisable in principle in light of new evidence, whereas religious ones are not. These ideas are given further expression and endorsement when she states that Religion, unlike science, is not primarily a kind of inquiry, but a body...

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