The Faith of Science

Walk up to any person on the street and ask him or her how science is defined, and chances are, the response you get will probably run along the lines of “discovering how the world works” or “finding out truths of nature through controlled experimentation.” Even Elise Hancock writes, “Scientific truth is a matter of evidence” (Ideas into Words 14). However, I would like to contest Hancock’s statement; she should’ve written that “faith is a matter of evidence, and science is a matter of faith.”

If “evidence is supposed to be true” (Hancock 14), then why do we have a history of false scientific theories? For example, in medieval times, people observed that maggots would spring “spontaneously” from a piece of rotting meat; through repeated observations, people began to believe the theory of spontaneous generation, which stated that living things would arise from nonliving things. However, through experiments involving control and variable groups, Louis Pasteur exposed the inaccuracy of the spontaneous generation theory. Polanyi states, “Another tenet of modern science…is its ideal of empiricism” (“Scientific Controversy” 197). Empiricism emphasizes evidence as derived through the constancy of sensory experience through experiment. However, as in the case of spontaneous generation, the evidence can be easily misconstrued—that is why actual, scientific “truth” is not a matter of evidence. Faith, on the other hand, is.

Nowadays, people understand faith as “blind,” or a “leap in the dark,” used only in religious contexts. However, Webster’s 1828 dictionary defines faith as “the assent of the mind to the truth of a proposition advanced by another; belief, or probable evidence of any kind” (emphasis added). Even biblical text asserts that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1 KJV, emphasis added).One has faith in something which one has good evidence to believe. Faith is considered a “virtue” because humans are so fickle; faith leads us to continue believing something despite trivial fluctuations of opinion or indigestion or superficial opposition (of course, some people, despite all other evidence against them, still tenaciously cling in faith to something; in these cases, “faith” is just a nice cover-up for pride and stubbornness). Basically, faith is the opposite of inconstancy or mutability, which is “like forgotten lyres whose dissonant strings / Give various response to each varying blast, / To whose frail frame no second motion brings / One mood or modulation like the last” (Shelley).  Such a turn of opinion (it’s too shallow to label “belief”) is caused by a lack of conviction based on evidence-following.

Intricately tied into the concept of faith is not only evidence but also passion. The heuristic passion that Polanyi mentions—the passion derived from knowledge gained through experience—motivates scientists to “enrich the world” (194). A prime example of heuristic passion in action is the kindergartner who goes home and excitedly shares with her mother all that she’s learned in school that day (“Mommy, did you know that red and blue make purple?! Could we play with food coloring too?”). That heuristic passion both inspires one toward further discovery (Polanyi 194) and manifests itself as tenderness with the subject of research; Siddhartha Mukherjee eloquently states, “When I witness science in action, I see this tenderness in abundance” (The Best American Science and Nature Writing xviii). Heuristic knowledge constitutes part of the “evidence” that make up faith, and as such, faith has a very, very personal element to it. The process by which knowledge is gained through experience plays a part in an individual’s story; as storytelling creatures, we also try to insert our characters into whatever story is being told at the time. I think this is why we encounter problems like the ones expressed in Jon Mooallem’s article, “The Love That Dare Not Squawk Its Name”: “For whatever reason, we’re prone to seeing animals…as reflection, models, and foils of ourselves; we’re extraordinarily, and sometimes irrationally, invested in them” (254). Anthropomorphism (this inserting ourselves into the story) even appears in a matter-of-fact excerpt from Jared Diamond’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee: “You yourself would not want to carry out a lengthy courtship and copulate under the watchful eyes of others; many animals do not want to either” (The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing 111).

Based on a system of faith, “science” is not as objective as we think; remember, “the genesis of scientific knowledge remains an unyieldingly, obstreperously hand-hewn process” (Mukherjee xviii-xix). Therefore, as science writers, we have all sorts of options when composing a paper: investigating the “line of evidence” behind a particular paradigm or taken-for-granted scientific “fact”; interviewing a scientist about his “heuristic passion” driving his research, etc. By redefining our conceptions of what constitutes science, we might also reconsider how we go about science writing.