Faith and Science

Preliminary Note

This blog post only represents my thoughts and experiences, and I recognize that I lack much philosophical breadth and critical thinking experience that would open further understanding to this topic. Because I claim to be a friend of science and religion, I do find this particular subject very interesting and I have thought about it for many years. 

Introduction to the Age-Old Debate

"What is truth?" asked Pontius Pilate, responding to Jesus Christ's testimony of self-proclaimed divinity. Pilate's question can be interpreted in two ways: was Pilate wanting to know what is objectively true, or was he wanting to know how Jesus knew what was claimed? Today I want to explore the latter question: how do we know what is true? 

There are many responses to this question, with some extreme claims being that only religion tells us what is true, or only science tells us what is true. As it turns out, this exact question is the foundation of an entire branch of philosophy called epistemology, the study of how we know what we claim to know. It has been explored for millennia by some of the greatest thinkers in recorded history.

In academia today, it often seems that the question is whether religion or spirituality is ever a credible source of truth, and in my experience, many scholars see religion as an absurd or even shameful ideology. From a certain perspective, I see where they are coming from; history is replete with examples of dogmatic religionists, from churches forcing Galileo to recant his model of heliocentricity to the utter rejection of Darwin's theory of evolution. These scholars may also occasionally encounter those that comment things like "the universe couldn't have started as an explosion", or from my personal experience, "you really believe that we came from monkeys?". It must be very frustrating to spend years studying empirically supported physics, chemistry, biology, and other sciences, only to hear from religious believers that their models can't possibly be correct because an ancient book says so. 

I waste no energy to provide evidence that scientific experiment is very good at building models of understanding and approaching absolute truth on the unknowns of the universe. However, science has limitations, and it is evident that there exists dogmatism within the scientific community that doesn't accept them. For example, in the novel Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, the renowned anthropologist Yuval Harari writes about the early history of humankind but then suddenly begins a shifted monologue, saying "there are no gods in the universe outside of the common imagination of human beings . . .  religious myths are imagined fictions produced from collective imagination, not objective reality". How could Harari possibly know this? Did he come to this conclusion by studying the bones of these early humans? It is likely that his statement is either formed from metaphysical conjecture or emotion, and I reject the idea that one can truly know the metaphysical solely on the basis of science. Indeed, the word metaphysical means "beyond the physical".

The goal of science has always been to set aside emotion and observe. 

In the oft-repeated and perhaps superficial words of my Sunday school teachers, "religion explains the why, and science explains the how". 

They also argue that the why is either of no consequence or it is entirely unanswerable, as theoretical physicist Sean Carroll states, "the universe simply is, without ultimate cause or explanation". 

On Faith

Why is faith a requirement of religion? To the scientific community, religious faith seems ridiculous. If gods are real, why can't we observe them? Why do they not descend to the earth, appear to all mankind, and show themselves to us? For some time, this was a significant mental hurdle that I didn't know how to overcome, especially considering that God wants us to obey a set of commandments. If He expects everyone to follow those commandments, then why not set the expectations more clearly? Why involve any level of ambiguity at all?

As I religiously understand faith, it is well described in the Book of Mormon as being a "hope for things which are not seen, which are true" (Alma 32:21). Scientists must exercise "faith" to a degree in the form of what is known as an axiom, which is an unprovable statement that is assumed to be true. As an example, an axiom that Einstein's principle of relativity rests on is that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant regardless of how fast the observer or source is moving. However, we currently have no way to prove this: it is physically impossible to measure how fast light moves in one direction (we can only measure the trip and return trip, then divide by two). So, in order for larger scientific truths to be confirmed, they rest on smaller, logical assumptions.

Additionally 

, it has been well proven that 

Famous Scottish philosopher David Hume famously stated "is cannot be derived from ought". 

I find it peculiar that there are some scientists who cannot accept the existence of a classical God, and yet claim there is no evidence contrary to our universe existing as a simulation. Fundamentally, these are the same thing.