Faith in "things not seen"

My Dad just sent me this article, entitled Things not seen, saying that it summarizes his belief in the nature of faith.

It's obvious to me that the point of this article is to make an appeal to the more emotional side of human experience. The problem is that the author (as with most people) uses "faith" to blur the lines between the subjective and the objective. Some people see faith as the part of our psyche that helps us get through the difficult times -- the little voice in the back of our heads that tells us to "hang in there". But that "faith" is all too often used as an excuse to ignore critical thinking and to override common sense.

I have to take issue with her analogy of faith to things "unseen" in physics. I hear this argument quite a bit: "You can't see the wind, so you must have faith that it's there." That's nonsense, of course -- there are many other ways that I can demonstrate without faith that the wind is there. I can see with my eyes the effects of the wind on other objects in the world. I can feel the wind on my skin. We have scientific models that show exactly how wind works.

In science there are many things that we cannot observe with our human senses. We can see microscopic things, but only with the aid of an optical microscope. Optics can only get us so far because of the physical limits of light when reflecting off of an object. To see smaller, we have to use an electron microscope. We use different methods to observe different things. Thanks to technology, we aren't limited to our human senses. We can use instruments which translate the small invisible things into something that we can interpret using our natural senses.

Now here's my problem with equating this to faith. Most definitions of faith involve believing with a high degree of certainty that something is true without requiring any evidence to demonstrate such truth. Science is just the opposite. We know with a high degree of certainty that subatomic particles exist because we have been able to scientifically confirm their existence over and over again through experimentation. Just because we cannot see them with our natrual senses does not mean that we have to take it on faith that they exist. When someone makes a claim that that subatomic particles exist, we can believe it because we have mountains of empirical data to back it up.

If faith were a valid tool for determining whether or not something was true, I could tell you that drinking Mountain Dew will make you invisible, and you would have no reason to doubt that claim. I could simply tell you to take it on faith. We know, however, through simple scientific observation, that Mountain Dew in fact does not make you invisible. The same scientific process should be applied to any claim, whether it be unicorns, UFO's, fairies, or gods.

I also believe that the Polkinghorn quote is a bit misleading by saying that we "infer" the existence of subatomic particles (implying that we should do the same with our belief in God). What he fails to mention are the different types of inference used in science. In science we use inductive inference to make predictions, but we use deductive inference to confirm those predictions. Polinghorne's work was mostly inductive, however the folks at CERN and FermiLab use deductive reasoning and experimentation to confirm the predictions made by subatomic theorists. There are some theories that have not made it that far -- we are still searching for the higgs-boson. It might not exist at all -- we won't know for sure until we can demonstrate it exists using the scientific method. That's how science and skeptical inquiry work, and thank goodness for it! I don't want people walking around naked because they think their Mountain Dew makes them invisible.

Leia Mais…