Question: Do science and faith go together? (controversial!)

David Pyle answered on 11 Mar 2011:

A very good question!

Science and faith can be thought of as two different ways of thinking about and explaining the world we live in. Science is a process of trying to develop ideas (hypotheses) about how and why things are the way they are; and then of making observations and developing tools and techniques to test those hypotheses and so to advance our understanding. Science progresses by a combination of chance discovery, inspired thinking, technical innovation and the steady growth of ‘knowledge’ – based on observations, measurements and ideas that seem to work. It’s probably a mistake to think of science as always moving ‘forwards’, but this seems to be linked with the (Victorian?) ideas of scientific ‘progress’ and ‘advancement’ and so on. In my own area, new ideas tend to feel a bit like suddenly having a better pair of glasses on; or using the binoculars the right way round – things that were hazy, or distant, suddenly become more clearly focussed.

In contrast to science, which is perhaps a way of explaining the natural world by appealing to ‘natural’ explanations; or a way of using observations to lead to an answer that is ‘probable’, faith can be seen as requiring conviction (perhaps that there is a higher purpose to life; or a different way of thinking about why we are here). If this is the meaning of faith, then I don’t necessarily see a contradiction between science and faith: science explains the things that it can, and faith can take care of the rest. Of course, this doesn’t really help when it comes to the bits of science that are closer to philosophy: answering the ‘whys?’ of evolution, or particle physics, perhaps.

Whether science and faith can go together is an area where a lot has been written – but it seems to me that the argument is often reduced to an oversimplified ‘battle’ between the ‘rational objectivity’ of science and the ‘religious dogma’ of faith. This misses the point: both science and faith are built on sets of assumptions, and both fit into some sort of belief system. Sometimes those assumptions are mutually incompatible: for example, a literal belief in biblical creation is hard to reconcile with a geological view of evolution.

Many of the key turning points in science have come about when someone has realised the whole belief system (in a set of ideas, observations) is just wrong, and they have then had to create a new way of putting things together. In Earth Sciences, two examples of this that stand out for me. In the mid-nineteenth Century, Kelvin, a prominent physicist, used arguments based on physics to show that Earth could not be nearly as old as some geologists were starting to think. His argument was powerful and widely believed. But he was wrong: his conviction (faith?) that the natural laws of physics as known then could provide a definitive answer to the problem was misplaced. In fact, while Kelvin assumed that the Earth’s interior was rigid, and could only lose heat by conduction, it is now clear that the Earth’s interior can convect, and move like a fluid.

A few decades later, another generation of physicists demolished the ideas of ‘continental drift’.. and Wegener’s ideas had to wait another forty years to be re-interpreted as the plate tectonics of today.