Faith and Science – Part I

With God's help

The Meaning of Belief in God, and a Bit About the Ways of Grounding It

A Personal Introduction

My intention here is to try to sketch an outline of the relationship between faith and science as I understand it. Let me say at the outset that my approach to faith is entirely rational, and I do not intend to slide 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 the intellect, and nowhere else).

These two disciplines (I am not sure whether faith is a discipline. I tend to think that at least its foundations are part of philosophy) are dear to me, and I have a good deal of confidence in both. Both seem reasonable and sensible to me, and giving up either of them is a step for which I would require weighty reasons. For the time being, I know of no such reasons. On the contrary, I know of weighty reasons to hold on to both.

It is commonly thought that atheism is a rational position, whereas religious faith is something mystical, unrelated to our ordinary reason (the one that serves us in science and daily life). Yet in my view the opposite is true. In my opinion, a rational worldview leads to faith and requires faith. Matters reach the point that, to the best of my judgment, it is impossible to be a rational atheist. By this I mean not only to argue that belief in God is a conclusion compelled by various rational considerations, but also to argue that faith is the only possible guarantor of rationality itself (including science).

I would add that, in my view, the heaviest price I would have to pay if and when I were required to give up my belief in God would be the abandonment of rationality. For me, that is the basic relation between faith and science.

Faith and Science: Between Christianity and Judaism

Contradictions between faith and science are a fairly ancient topic. It seems that they preoccupy Christianity primarily, and Judaism much less so (I am not familiar with the situation in Islam). In the United States, 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 topics, certainly not in recent years. My book 'God Plays Dice', which appeared in Hebrew in the last year, is a rather unusual exception on this map.

This is a fascinating phenomenon in the sociology of religion, but it is also connected to the basic contents and modes of orientation of the different religions. In the Christian world (especially the Catholic one) there is a pope, and the decision about what is right and what is not is institutional. The pope is the one who decides whether the sun revolves around the earth or vice versa. He decides whether evolution is an acceptable theory and how it should be interpreted. By contrast, in the Jewish world, at least until recent generations, there are no popes. Those responsible for scientific and factual knowledge are not the rabbinic establishment but various experts. Scientific determinations are not supposed to receive rabbinic approval, and there are no procedures for changing one's outlook regarding facts (as is customary in the Christian world). Already Maimonides, more than 800 years ago, states in his book Guide of the Perplexed, Part II, chapter 25:

Know that our refraining from the doctrine of the eternity of the world is not because of the scriptural verses found in the Torah indicating that the world was created anew. For the verses indicating the world's creation are no more numerous than the verses indicating that God is corporeal. Nor are the gates of interpretation closed to us or inaccessible in the matter of the world's creation; rather, it would have been possible for us to interpret them as we did in rejecting corporeality. Indeed, this might have been much easier, and we would have been more able to interpret those verses so as to uphold the eternity of the world, just as we interpreted the verses and rejected the notion that He, may He be exalted, is corporeal.

Later there as well, Maimonides states that if we are persuaded by a demonstration (=proof), scientific or philosophical, of some fact, then the scriptural texts are not supposed to affect that conclusion. At most, we will need some creative interpretation in order to bring the texts into line with our factual conclusions.

Ultimately, in the Jewish world, scientific views and conceptions are determined by scientific means. There are some limits on this freedom (the principles of faith also concern several facts: that the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world, that He gave the Torah, that He supervises what happens, and so on), but these are only a few very basic and general assertions, certainly not such-or-such details.

Outline of the Discussion

The nature of conflicts between faith and science is that they are charged with strong emotions on both sides (atheist and believing), which often leads the discussion onto heated, biased, and non-substantive tracks. The sides usually tend not to listen, and therefore also not to be persuaded.

If we nevertheless wish to conduct a rational and systematic discussion of these issues, it seems to me that such a discussion should proceed as follows: first, one must define the believer's claim. Atheism will be defined as the negation of faith. To do that, we must define the content of faith (what is the God in whom one believes) and the place of faith within the psyche (intellect, emotion, and the like). After that, we must examine the ways in which faith can be grounded, and in that context we will need the different ways of accumulating information in general (as in science). Only after we have gone through all these stages can we examine the relations between belief in God and scientific results, findings, and basic assumptions.

Naturally, the space here is limited, and it will not allow me to elaborate as would be fitting on issues so weighty and complex. What I will try to do here is sketch a somewhat more detailed outline that offers a framework for thought and discussion of these issues. Each reader can fill in this framework according to their own understanding and in their own way.

Is Faith a Factual Claim?

Many argue that faith is a matter of emotion rather than intellect. Some say that it is something above reason (what does that even mean?). In some places one encounters claims that faith does not concern facts but experiences and emotions, that is, that it is something subjective.

From such approaches one can arrive at a conclusion that splits in two apparently opposing directions: 1. Strengthening faith. If this is something that does not deal with facts and makes no claim about them, then there is no need to wrestle with conflicts with science. The problematic aspect disappears on its own. Faith here receives automatic legitimacy, 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 a position that cannot be attacked (I am not speaking about whether it is falsifiable; we will address that later), and thus it is exempt from defending itself. 2. Weakening the meaning of faith. If this is a subjective feeling, then there is nothing real here (beyond psychology), and therefore a declaration of faith is no more than a report about a mental state, not a claim about the world. According to this approach, one may assume that there is no room for faith in the factual-objective sense. Emotions are of course legitimate, since they are the private concern of the person who feels them. But in the final analysis, the assumption here is that faith cannot be something grounded, reasonable, or rational.

Although these arguments take faith in opposing directions, they are really two sides of the same coin. Because faith expresses a subjective feeling rather than factual claims, it is not open to attack. But that itself follows from the fact that it is not really asserting anything.

A person who declares a love of chocolate is not making a substantive claim. He is declaring some feeling or inclination that exists within him, but there is no claim here about the world in a sense that might (or could) give rise to any dispute.

I want to open the discussion by positing a position opposed to the picture I have described thus far. For me, faith is a factual claim. When I say that I believe in God, I mean to make a factual claim: 'God exists.' If this is indeed a true claim in my view, then of course the simple logical conclusion follows from it that the claim 'God does not exist' is false.

The same is true of an atheistic position. In my view it too is a position that makes a factual claim: 'God does not exist.' Therefore the conclusion follows from it that the claim 'God exists' is false. A factual claim, unlike experiences and emotions, is subject to the laws of logic, and if the claim is true then its opposite is false, and vice versa.

From the picture I have described it follows that what we have here is a dispute in which everything is at stake. My intention here is to reject the all-too-comfortable flight into the subjective, which exempts us from confronting the questions.

It is important to understand that up to this point I have not yet argued that belief in God is in fact correct, and certainly I have not explained why I think it is correct. All I have argued is that faith is a factual claim, whether true or false. This means that it must be discussed in terms of truth or falsehood, and the avenue of escape into subjectivity that I described above is not relevant.

As an aside, I would add here that, so long as no discussion is conducted clarifying the meaning of faith, it is unclear 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 it includes a not inconsiderable number of believers in the first sense, the subjective-emotional-experiential one, and that only some of those defined as believers are believers in the sense I have defined here. Therefore, my tendency is to attribute rather limited significance to these surveys (as to many others as well).

The Content of Faith: What Is God?

The next stage of the discussion should address the question what this entity is that I am speaking about (or in which I believe). How is it to be defined? There must, after all, be some content to such a belief if one is to claim that it is a factual claim. The claim must contain some content.

I will not enter here into wearisome and not especially fruitful discussions, and for the purposes of this discussion I will suffice with God as an abstract being, apparently possessed of very great powers, that created the world and governs it in some sense.

On top of this general characterization one can continue to add various particular contents, such as the religious contents of the different religions (for example: 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 became incarnate in him, and so forth). The significance of the distinction between these two levels will be discussed later.

Ways of Grounding Faith

If we were dealing with faith in its subjective sense, the question of methods of confirmation and argument would not be relevant. But in light of the claim that this is a factual claim, the question of confirmation and grounding becomes relevant and important. Therefore, the next stage of the discussion is to examine what avenues are available to us for grounding this factual claim, and what relation these avenues bear to the avenues through which we accumulate and ground scientific knowledge.

In this matter, two principal paths are open to us: the empiricist and the rationalist (not: 'rational,' since both paths lay claim to rationality). Empiricism is an approach that believes in accumulating information exclusively from observation. Rationalism is willing to adopt also information derived from a priori philosophical considerations, that is, conclusions of reasoning and not only results obtained from observation. We shall later see that this distinction is not as sharp as one might think.

At first glance, the empirical route is not relevant to the question of faith, since there seems to be no way to observe God by means of the senses, or through any measuring instruments. It therefore seems that only the rationalist route remains open to us, that is, to derive God's existence from various philosophical considerations.

Is this really so? In his first Critique, Kant divides the possible proofs of God's existence into three types: 1. An ontological consideration, which derives God's existence from philosophical-conceptual analysis. 2. A cosmological consideration, which derives God's existence from the very fact that something exists (the assumption being that everything must have a cause, or ground). 3. A physico-theological consideration, sometimes called the 'argument from design' (or from complexity. This involves the use of the assumption that a complex thing, or a thing fitted to its purpose and seemingly planned, is unlikely to have arisen on its own. Therefore, there must be someone who made/created it).

The first type of argument is a priori, and therefore plainly belongs to the rationalist category. The second type already requires the result of some observation, but in a very minimal sense: the fact that there is something that exists. The third type of argument lies in the intermediate space between the empirical and the rationalist. On the one hand, it relies on specific properties of reality, and these are of course results of observation (the fact that the world is complex and designed is not known to us a priori; rather, we become aware of it by observing the world). On the other hand, the conclusion we have drawn does not belong to science, if only because it does not yield predictions, and therefore it is not open to scientific confirmation or refutation. Thus it may be a conclusion from observations, but it itself does not belong to the scientific sphere.

In the next installments, I shall continue the outline presented here. Among other things, I shall try to examine in greater detail the ways of arriving at faith, and especially to compare them with the ways we use within the framework of science. After that, I shall turn to examining the relations between faith and science.