Faith and Science – Part 1

With God’s help

The meaning of faith in God and a little about the ways to establish it

Personal introduction

I intend to try and outline here the relationship between faith and science, as I perceive it. I will say in advance that my approach to faith is completely rational, and I do not intend to delve into any mysticism or arguments 'above reason' and the like (in fact, I do not really understand what arguments 'above reason' are. Arguments and beliefs exist in reason, and nowhere else).

Both of these disciplines (I don't know if faith is a discipline. I tend to think that at least its infrastructure is part of philosophy) are dear to my heart, and I have considerable faith in them. Both are reasonable and logical in my opinion, and giving up one of them is a step that would require weighty reasons for me to take. So far, I know of no such reasons. On the contrary, I know of weighty reasons for holding on to both.

It is common to think that atheism is a rational position, while religious faith is something mystical, unrelated to our ordinary logic (the one that we use in science and everyday life). However, in my opinion, the opposite is true. In my opinion, a rational worldview leads to faith and requires faith. Things come to the point that, to the best of my judgment, it is not possible to be a rational atheist. What I mean by this is not only to claim that belief in God is a conclusion that is required by various rational considerations, but also to claim that faith is the only possible guarantee of rationality (and of science in general).

I would add that in my opinion the heaviest price I would have to pay if and when I have to give up my belief in God is the renunciation of rationality. This, for me, is the basic relationship between faith and science.

Faith and Science: Between Christianity and Judaism

Contradictions between faith and science are a fairly old topic. It seems to concern Christianity mainly, and Judaism much less (I am not familiar with the situation in Islam). In the US, dozens of books and hundreds of articles are published against Richard Dawkins and against scientific atheism. Almost all of these works are written by Christians. There is hardly a single book written by a Jew on these subjects, certainly not in recent years. My book 'God Plays Dice', which was published in Hebrew last year, is quite an exception on this map.

This is a fascinating phenomenon in the sociology of religion, but it is also related to the fundamental content and forms of reference of the various religions. In the Christian world (mainly Catholic) there is a Pope and the decision of what is true and what is not is institutional. It is the Pope who decides whether the sun revolves around the Earth or vice versa. It is he who decides whether evolution is an acceptable theory and how it should be interpreted. In contrast, in the Jewish world, at least until recent generations, there are no Popes. The one responsible for scientific and factual knowledge is not the rabbinical establishment but various experts. Scientific determinations are not supposed to receive a rabbinical seal, and there are no procedures for changing one's view of facts (as is customary in the Christian world). Maimonides, over 800 years ago, states in his book Teacher of the Confused, 2nd P.C.:

Know that we are not escaping from the discussion of the beginning of the world because of the scriptures that came in the Torah when the world was renewed, because the scriptures that teach about the renewal of the world are no more than the scriptures that teach about the name being rain, and the gates of interpretation are not closed to us and are not denied to us regarding the renewal of the world, but it would have been possible for us to interpret them as we did in excluding the incarnations, and perhaps that would have been much easier, and we would have been able to better interpret those verses and establish the beginning of the world, as we interpreted the scriptures and excluded it from being rain.

Further down in his words, Maimonides states that if we have been convinced by evidence (=proof), scientific or philosophical, of some fact, then the Scriptures should not influence our conclusion. At most, we will need creative interpretation to adapt the Scriptures to our factual conclusions.

Ultimately, in the Jewish world, scientific views and perceptions are determined by scientific tools. There are some limitations on this freedom (the tenets of faith also deal with several facts: that God created the world, that He gave the Torah, that He oversees what happens, etc.), but these are only a few very fundamental and general assertions, and certainly not specific details.

Discussion outline

The nature of conflicts between faith and science is that they are charged with strong emotions on both sides (the atheist and the believer), which often leads the discussion into contentious, biased, and irrelevant lines. The parties usually tend not to listen, and therefore not to be convinced.

If we nevertheless wish to conduct a rational and systematic discussion on these issues, it seems to me that such a discussion should proceed as follows: First, the believer's claim must be defined. Atheism will be defined as the negation of faith. To this end, we must define the content of faith (what is the God in whom we believe) and the position of faith in the soul (that reason is emotion, etc.). Then we must examine the ways in which faith can be established, and in doing so we will need the various ways of gathering information in general (as in science). Only after we have gone through all these stages will we be able to examine the relationships between faith in God and scientific results, findings, and assumptions.

Naturally, the platform here is short, and it will not allow me to go into as much detail as I should on such heavy and complex issues. What I will try to do here is to sketch a slightly more detailed outline, which will offer a framework for thinking and discussing these issues. Each reader can fill this framework according to his understanding and in his own way.

Is belief a statement of fact?

Many claim that faith is a matter of emotion and not reason. Some say that it is something beyond reason (what is that anyway?). In some places one can see claims that faith is not about facts but about experiences and feelings, that is, that it is something subjective.

From such approaches, one can reach a conclusion that splits into two seemingly opposing directions: 1. Strengthening faith. If it is something that does not deal with facts and does not claim anything about them, then there is no need to grapple with conflicts with science. The problematic nature is obvious. Faith here receives automatic legitimacy, which is very characteristic of our postmodern world. It is a kind of narrative, or feeling, and it is no worse than any other narrative. Faith becomes an unassailable position (I am not talking about being refutable. We will touch on that later), and thus it is exempt from defending itself. 2. The weakening of the meaning of faithIf it is a subjective feeling, then there is nothing real here (beyond psychology), and therefore a statement of belief is nothing more than a report of a mental state, and not a claim about the world. According to this approach, it can be assumed that there is no place for belief in the factual-objective sense. Feelings are of course legitimate, since they are the private matter of the feeler. But the bottom line here is that belief cannot be something well-founded, reasonable, or rational.

Although these arguments take faith in opposite directions, they are actually two sides of the same coin. Since faith expresses subjective emotion rather than factual claims, it is unassailable. But this itself stems from the fact that it does not really claim anything.

A person who declares his love for chocolate is not making a significant claim. He is declaring some emotion or inclination that he has, but there is no claim about the world in the sense that might (or might) provoke any debate.

I want to open the discussion by presenting a position that is contrary to the picture I have described so far. For me, faith is a claim of fact. When I say that I believe in God, I mean to claim a claim of fact: 'There is a God.' If this is indeed a true claim in my eyes, then of course the simple logical conclusion follows, that the claim 'There is no God' is false.

The same is true of an atheistic position. In my opinion, this too is a position that claims a factual claim: 'There is no God.' Therefore, from it is derived the conclusion that the claim 'There is a God' is false. A factual claim, unlike experiences and feelings, is subject to the laws of logic, and if the claim is true then its opposite is false and vice versa.

The picture I described suggests that there is a debate about the whole issue here. My intention here is to rule out the possibility of the so-convenient escape to the subjective, which exempts us from dealing with the questions.

It is important to understand that I have not yet claimed that belief in God is indeed true, and I certainly have not explained why I think it is true. All I have claimed is that belief is a statement of fact, whether true or false. This means that it must be discussed in terms of truth or falsehood, and the direction of escape into subjectivity that I described above is irrelevant.

As an anecdote, I will add here that until a discussion is held that clarifies the meaning of faith, it is not clear how we should relate to the findings of various surveys that indicate fantastic percentages of believers in the general population. When such a survey shows that 70-80% of the population believe in God, I assume that it includes a significant amount of believers in the first, subjective-emotional-experiential sense, and only some of those defined as believers are believers in the sense I have defined here. Therefore, my tendency is to attribute to these surveys (as well as to many others) a rather limited significance.

The content of faith: What is God?

The next stage of the discussion should deal with the question of what is this entity that I am talking about (or in which I believe)? How do we define it? After all, there must be content to such a belief in order for it to be possible to claim that it is a claim of fact. The claim must contain some content.

I will not enter into particularly tedious and unproductive discussions here, and will suffice for the purpose of discussing G-d as an abstract entity, apparently possessing very great powers, who created the world and governs it in some sense.

On top of this general characterization, one can continue to load various particular contents, such as the religious contents of the various religions (such as: This entity also brought us out of Egypt, and wrote and gave us the Torah at Mount Sinai. Or: This entity also revealed itself to Jesus and was embodied within him, etc.). The significance of the distinction between these two levels will be discussed later.

Ways to establish faith

If we were dealing with belief in its subjective sense, the question of methods of verification and reasoning would not be relevant. But in light of the claim that this is a claim of fact, the question of verification and substantiation becomes relevant and important. Therefore, the next step in the discussion is to examine the ways available to us to substantiate this claim of fact, and what is the relationship of these ways to the ways in which we accumulate and establish scientific information.

On this subject, two fundamental paths are open to us: empirical and rationalist (and not: 'rational', since both paths claim rationality). Empiricism is an approach that believes in accumulating information solely from observations. Rationalism is also willing to adopt information derived from a priori philosophical considerations, that is, conclusions of thinking and not only results obtained from observations. Later it will appear that this distinction is not as sharp as one might think.

The empirical path is seemingly irrelevant to the question of faith, since there does not seem to be any way to observe G-d through the senses, or through any measuring devices. Therefore, it seems that we are left with only the rationalist path, that is, to derive His existence from various philosophical considerations.

Is this really so? Kant, in his first 'Critique', divides the possible evidence for the existence of God into three types: 1. Ontological consideration, which deduces the existence of God from a philosophical-conceptual study. 2. Cosmological consideration, which deduces the existence of God from the very fact that something exists (the assumption is that everything must have a cause, or reason). 3. Physico-theological consideration, which is sometimes referred to as 'evidence from design' (or from complexity. This involves using the assumption that something complex or something that fits its purpose and seems designed is unlikely to have come into being by itself. Therefore, there must be someone who created it).

The first type of argument is a priori, and therefore clearly belongs to the rationalist category. The second type of argument already requires the result of some observation, but in a very minimal sense: the fact that something exists. The third type of argument is already somewhere between the empirical and the rationalist. On the one hand, there is a reliance here on specific properties of reality, and these are of course the results of observations (the fact that the world is complex and designed is not known to us a priori, but we become acquainted with it through observing the world). On the other hand, the conclusion we have drawn does not belong to science, if only because it does not give us predictions (predictions), and therefore it cannot be scientifically confirmed or refuted. Therefore, it may be a conclusion from observations, but it itself does not belong to the scientific sphere.

In the following columns, I will continue the outline presented here. Among other things, I will try to examine in more detail the ways to arrive at faith, and especially compare them with the ways we use within the framework of science. After that, I will examine the relationship between faith and science.