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From: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: The Fallacy of Faith
Message-ID: <637@dciem.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 18-Jan-84 19:23:38 EST
Article-I.D.: dciem.637
Posted: Wed Jan 18 19:23:38 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 18-Jan-84 20:49:03 EST
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Organization: D.C.I.E.M., Toronto, Canada
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Tom Craver is wrong about science not depending on faith, and not for
the reasons Laura Creighton brings up.  Tom could be correct IF each
scientist personally made all the observations and deductions that led
to the theories in which s/he believes.  But nobody can possibly do that.
The faith on which science is based is faith in the validity of reports.
You believe that false reports will be contradicted later by other reports
that are more consistent with data from yet other experiments.  The test
of your faith is not truth, but consistency.  Yet the structure of science,
in the form of the range of its theories, is quite loose.  We KNOW that
all our theories will sooner or later prove to be wrong in some detail.
We don't have perfect consistency.  So, reports that are inconsistent
with what we think other reports imply may well prove not to be false.
They may merely tell us that our current interpretations are wrong.

Yes, science is based on faith.  But it isn't faith in facts, it's
faith in the ultimate consistency of the world, if ever we could
understand it.
-- 

Martin Taylor
{allegra,linus,ihnp4,uw-beaver,floyd,ubc-vision}!utzoo!dciem!mmt