Doubting Faith,
Doubting Science

Hawking later rowed back from this opinion, and wisely so. Although groundbreaking three centuries ago, Newton’s physics is today understood to be only a partial account of how things work. lt doesn’t explain weird and wonderful things like relativity and quantum phenomena.

The history of science gives us many more examples of knowledge that, while considered sound at the time, look obviously incomplete or falsely founded in hindsight.  It would seem sensible to keep an open mind in the present about how much science really knows, and what mysteries may still be out there.

And yet science, unlike faith, has a reputation for knowing things with certainty. Faith, as the unkind saying goes, is believing something even when you know it is not true. 

In fact, both science and religion have their fundamentalist believers and their doubting practitioners.

David Hume, who lived in the eighteenth century, was a big believer in the evidence that we get from our eyes and other senses. Good science, for Hume, restricted itself to these methods. Do we see it? Do we see it again, and again, in a reliable pattern? Then it’s a fact. (Eventually, this definition of science came to be known as ‘empiricist’.)  

Hume, and philosophers who came after him, ultimately inspired a kind of fundamentalist science that emerged in the late nineteenth or twentieth century and is often called ‘scientism’. Scientism doesn’t have an exact definition any more than religious fundamentalism does, but it generally asserts that science is the only route to true knowledge of the world. This route is often described as the ‘scientific method’: creating hypotheses and testing them in repeatable ways, usually in a laboratory.

Ironically, other philosophers of science quickly found that Hume’s ideas about scientific certainty were actually easy to disprove. We can observe something lots of times but we can never be sure that the next time will be the same. In other words, we can never prove facts. Karl Popper tried to get around this by saying that science’s route to certain knowledge lies instead through disproving incorrect hypotheses or facts (falsification) - but this didn’t help much, not least because it implied that the theory of evolution wasn’t good science! 

Other philosophers demonstrated how the hypotheses that we make about the world are limited in the sense that they reflect our own mental experience. A famous sketch by the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach makes this point beautifully. Where does my perception of the world end and ‘reality’ begin?

Finally, philosophers of science showed that hypotheses and perceptions are not just limited by personal experience, but by shared realities. Thomas Kuhn is well-known for his idea of ‘paradigms’, shared ways of thinking that identify what the key scientific questions are and how to find the answers to them. The radical implication of his theory is that there is no way of proving that one paradigm, one way of knowing, is better than another. Since Kuhn’s time, many other thinkers have demonstrated something like paradigms at work, as for example with the sexist and racist assumptions that have been baked into many models of psychology and designs for technology.

All these philosophers are a bit like theologians of science, discussing and critiquing the truths that scientists create. Like the more usual kinds of theologian, their positions range from the celebratory to the sceptical. They are the critical friends of the scientific and technological activity that continues around them, and around us all. 

The demand that we need to demonstrate the abstract truth of religion before we begin on a path of faith is neither philosophically necessary nor historically how things have been. 

On the intellectual level, for example, apophatic theology (once neglected, but now making a return to favour) emphasises the unknowability of God, making a virtue of uncertainty. This approach has a long tradition in Christianity as well as other world religions such as Buddhism. It is closely connected with mystical faith practices. 

In our everyday lives, we practise religion in much the same way that we practise scientific inquiry, or making new technologies. Rather than measuring ourselves against an ideal-type of scientific or theological standard, we get on with the task in front of us, solving problems and asking questions as we go.  

Philosophy of science and theology both gift us with questions. Challenging us in constructive ways, they are an antidote to the dangers of being over-confident in our certainty.