Faith in Faith...

Attacks on The God Delusion have been churning up the silt and uncovering the dullest and moldiest apologetics for religion.  No matter how many times the old justifications are refuted they keep getting dusted off and presented as if they were new.  As I was browsing other people's blogrolls I ran across another example.  The author apparently wrote a critical review of Dawkins' book and this post is a reply to the negative comments it generated.

He (I use "he" as a gender non-specific pronoun here) accuses skeptics of being a clique, where luminaries like Dawkins can get away with making statements that would be attacked by the same skeptics if said by someone outside their circle.  I think the charge is unfair, but it's certainly a widely held opinion.  As evidence he suggests that when he calls the idea of memes "speculation that isn't susceptible to falsification and that it is based on word play instead of observable science" the skeptics attack him in anger.  That seems odd to me.  "Memetics" is speculative and not a science at this stage, and Susan Blackmore (who he also places in the "in group") says as much in her book The Meme Machine.  She outlines a program for experimental falsification, but it's still an open question whether it can really be made to work.  As for his complaint about Dawkins talking about "smart genes," I have no idea what he's referring to.  If he means "selfish genes," which Dr. Dawkins wrote a book about, then this author should be well aware that the anthropomorphic adjective is only a metaphor for understanding some of the trickier evolutionary puzzles.  Dawkins is not ascribing motives or strategy to life's signal macromolecule.

Skeptics do have vigorous debates - and that can be mistaken for hostility - but they most certainly expect their own to rise to the highest standards of critical thinking and are quick to denounce them when they fail.  I don't care for Penn Jillette's "Bullshit," for example, because too much of it is just ad hominem attacks in service of his libertarian ideology.  I expect better from prominent skeptics.

Of course the existence of rude people on the Internet doesn't refute any of the actual content of Dawkins book or any other skepticism about supernatural or religious beliefs.  No matter; if this author wants to think that skeptics are closed minded that's his business.  But then he says this:

In the end it's a matter of faith as well as contingency. Faith, acting as if that which we don't know with absolute certainty is valid, believing that it is. There isn't a person alive, not the most rigorous skeptic, not the most doctrinaire positivist who doesn't exist in a sea of their own faith and the faith of others. There isn't one of us who doesn't work with ideas we have not tested ourselves or even have fully understood.

How can something so old and tired keep coming up again and again, quoted and reformulated by people who seemingly believe it?  The logical fallacy here is called equivocation: using a word or phrase which has two different meanings in a way that confuses the context.  It's like a pun - "word play" as this same author put it above.  When we say we have "faith in" someone it's not the same as when we say we believe something "on faith."  This is "faith" in two entirely different contexts which are being construed to be the same.  To have "faith in" requires an object, an agent who you trust to act on your behalf.  "Faith" in the religious sense is an object unto itself, a value which serves as the justification for knowledge.   The religious may profess to have "faith in" God, but it's their "faith" that allows them to accept the concept of God in the first place.

This author argues that scientific beliefs are predicated on this same circular argument, and that they are ultimately founded on trust in authority.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Every scientific result is subject to testing and falsification.  It's true that we all accept some scientific conclusions without testing them ourselves, and sometimes lack the ability to test them.  But that does not mean that we trust "on faith" the honesty and competence of all scientists.  Quite the opposite.  Active scientific research is extremely competitive, with enormously talented and egotistical people vying for huge rewards.  There is plenty of incentive to cheat, lie and fabricate.  But for every potential cheater there are dozens or hundreds of other researchers in the same field who dissect each result, criticize every decision, and pick at every potential flaw.  Grad students are notorious for undermining each other, and even mature scientists who celebrate a colleagues' success would still have preferred to have made the discovery themselves.

Thus when skeptics say they "have faith in science," it doesn't mean that they trust individual scientists, nor are they suggesting "faith" in the big-F religious sense is the foundation of their beliefs.  It means that they trust that the process of science - the competitive, cooperative validation of theory by evidence - is a process that discovers useful truths and accurately discards falsehoods.  Science is self-correcting.  That's why all the big scientific frauds and hoaxes have been revealed not by journalists or police, but by other scientists.  Far from being authoritarian, science is the ultimate in hard-headed empiricism and individualism.  Unless a whole lot of people have observed it, verified it, and squared it with theory, it isn't scientifically true.

And we'll tell you so.

- jack*

Comments

[Peggy Jacobs]

It doesn't prove anything, of course, but I find it encouraging that The God Delusion is still on the best seller rack here at the bookstore where I work. The book is being attacked because people are reading it.