Garvey: I think that there’s a faith that underlies just about every human action. But I think most scientists are unaware of the presuppositions that they believe in that allow them to do the work.
Hitt: Do you think it’s a comparable kind of faith to Catholicism?
Garvey: It’s probably less well thought out than Catholicism. It doesn’t have a 2000-year history of people trying to make sense out of it. It’s got a 200- or a 300- year history of people trying to make sense out of it.
Kee: As Rob pointed out, we don’t yet have a common language. A common language only comes out of entering into conversation where we acknowledge that we don’t have such a language, where we acknowledge what we don’t know on all sides, and then really engage. That’s what brings common language into being, I think.
Hwang: Actually, a lot hinges on this term “faith.” In any sort of logical argument, you have unproven assumptions. But does that amount to religious faith?
Kee: I would understand religious faith as being much more than a set of epistemological assumptions. However, there are certain dimensions of religious faith that function as epistemological assumptions. The fact that they are believed in doesn’t mean that there aren’t reasons for believing in them that are better or worse—even though they’re not grounded in the same way as the results of a scientific experiment.
Ledbetter: There’s a really powerful way in which science deliberately erects walls around itself to identify what is the business of science and what is not. And you need to be able to persuade people through the logic of your evidence that a truth is as you claim it to be. The anecdote will not stand in science. And, so, it’s perhaps a cop-out, but it’s kind of convenient, to be able to say, well, you know, science has no comment to make about the mutual experience of believers in whatever the experience of transcendence is theirs to attribute to religion.
Garvey: I don’t think science ever says, “This is a place where we don’t go.” I used to believe that there were certain places science wouldn’t go. Now I think there’s nowhere it can’t go. But everywhere it goes, it changes what it’s looking at. And maybe even what exists. I don’t think we do enough to help our students see that in science courses. There’s a book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn, which points out that we hardly ever talk about where science screwed up. It’s almost like we’re always so intent on trying to help our students see that science can really do some good and neat stuff that you don’t have time to talk about the blind alleys that science went down and so forth. I think neuroscience is a great example of a place where, as science goes there, things are going to be more deterministic, more materialistic, because that’s all that science can do.
Ledbetter: That’s true, but at the same time, it doesn’t change the fact that there remains that which is either inexplicable scientifically or beyond the realm of science to try to explain. And, in fact, you can even abstract it to the kind of emergent property that happens when people gather together and share things in community that one individual person cannot do. For me, that’s what religion is.
Freeman: I’m teaching a book this semester for the first time, The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of the Mind and How to Reconcile Them. It speaks with a remarkable certainty about what it is that neuroscience can do in terms of colonizing all of human reality. In this book, the author says, there are no souls. Let’s get beyond this notion altogether, and maybe if we do that we’ll be able to free ourselves from some of the shackles that have led to some of the awful things that we see in the world. That’s a point of view that students should encounter, but it’s equally important for me to be able to help them see the presumptions.
Fr. Clark: I want to say the same thing about faith that you’re saying about science—that there’s no place it cannot go. My fear when I’m looking at some of the polarization that’s taking place within the Church today is this sense that there are places where angels fear to tread, you know? That the religious response to something like the idea of being “wired for God” is, “no, we can’t talk about that, we can’t go there.” But people are thinking about these ideas and people are showing us evidence that what they’re saying might have something behind it. And so, we have to ask what basis is there for a faith that just maintains itself by lopping off all these areas of thought that are emerging? A truly strong faith will be able to face these ideas, not simply try to suppress them.
Bellin: I don’t see science as a faith. Faith and spirituality are where you find comfort and understanding in the personal conflicts in your life. Science is trying to understand the underpinnings of how things do what they do, the nature of things. Science is understanding the mechanisms of how it all happens. I don’t see science as faith, because there are ways we can test it.
Kee: I don’t think anybody here ever said science was a faith. Mary Lee, you were saying that science delimits objects of study. And in doing that, as long as it stays within those limits and understands that it stays within those limits, it’s producing knowledge. One of the questions that science bracketed was the traditional metaphysical question of radical origins: Why is there something, why not nothing? Why are things as they are, and not some other way? Science can’t handle those questions because there’s no method for investigating them. So it posits a realm of presence and simply takes what’s given empirically and investigates its structure. Science is not interested in the particular plant, it’s interested in the structure of a plant. It’s not interested in a water molecule, it’s interested in the structure of all water molecules. That leaves a tremendous amount of reality. When we behave as ethical beings, we’re never just concerned with universal structures, we’re always concerned with a kind of irreducible, singular situation, a set of relations that requires intelligence and prudence in judgment. Although clearly knowing some of the results of science about the brain might be relevant, you know. For example, we don’t treat people with mental illness as if they were possessed by a demon.
Faith & Science: A Forum, continued>>>
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