Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

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I mean, I'm a pretty big anti-theist, and I think that misinformation and supernatural thinking is pretty much invariably bad, but I'll admit that I have some level of "faith".

I have "faith" in the sense that I don't think most scientists are faking scientific papers. I have faith that when the NIH publishes a study it's usually accurate. I have faith that physics and mathematics is a good way of modeling the world.

The reason I say "faith" is because conceivably I could dispute every paper and try and replicate it on my own, and try and go through elaborate proofs to make sure every mathematical theorem is correct, and I think there might even be value in that, but I also have a life to live. At some point, I have to put my trust into others and just hope it works out, and usually it does.

Of course, this falls apart, there's been plenty of cases of scientists faking data, the NIH and CDC have gotten stuff wrong before, and plenty of things in physics have been proven wrong either mathematically or experimentally, so of course it's not a perfect system (nothing involving trust ever is), but I will acknowledge that way I live my life involves something that could be considered "faith".

Nah dude. That’s exactly what I am saying. Your “faith” in science is not misplaced, and it is not absent evidence of working. If science didn’t work, you couldn’t have written that comment. You also have evidence that a small minority of people exploit that trust for personal gain, but this is a fixable thing.

This is an entirely different definition of faith.

Sure, I would say that it's not an article of faith to say that, I don't know, transistors work as expected, because obviously I can very clearly demonstrate that by sending this very message.

But "science" isn't a monolith. Most science is stuff I don't really understand with any kind of intimate detail. Pretty much anything involving chemistry, biology, health, or physics is over my head; I'll try and read the abstract of a paper in those subjects and I feel like I generally understand it well enough, but I don't know enough to actually criticize anything.

If we take the Jan Hendrik Schon scandal from about 22 years ago, I know I would have read the papers and just taken on faith that the paper writer wasn't lying. I'm not equipped enough in physics or chemistry to call bullshit on anything being said in there and I probably would have trusted it. I also would have been wrong.

Now the Jan Hendrik Schon case isn't a great example, because of course he was caught, and it's tempting to say "see! Science is self-correcting!" and I think it broadly is, but at the same we really have no way of knowing how prevalent these cases of fraud actually are. Maybe other scientists are just better at covering up their tracks.

Of course this is getting into the bigger "replication crisis" in science, but I generally believe a vast majority of scientists are honest with their results, and I generally believe the results of their papers are at least truthful, but at some level that's an article of "faith", or maybe just an article of "intellectual laziness" on my end.

I guess I might argue that there's not much of a difference between the two.

Unlike scientific 'faith', religious faith requires hoop jumping to maintain it in the face of evidence proving it false/unlikely. Or reducing ones faith to unfalsifiable things.

I took the latter path until I realized there was nothing left but hot air and wasted time.

That's fair; I guess the difference between what I'm defining as "faith" is that I am more than happy to be wrong.

If it turned out that a paper was using fudged data, or the results were measured poorly, or that the math being used to crunch something was incorrect, I would like to think that I would be willing to readjust my position on it and go where the latest research points. Einstein proved that Newton's "laws" of physics were really just really good approximations, and I think the vast majority of physicists were willing to adjust accordingly.

If it turned out tomorrow that Type Theory was shown to be unsound or something, I'm pretty sure I'd just concede that I was wrong to believe it, and then move onto whatever revised framework came along to replace it. I wouldn't just tune out all contrary perspectives and vehemently insist that "no type theory is always right and I have faith!!!"

So you're right; it's not equivalent to religious faith, because religious faith typically involves readjusting your perception of the world to fit with it, while "faith" in science involves changing the data to fit better with the world.

Assuredly there are some things you believe which aren’t scientifically provable? In particular questions about how one should order their life? Not questions about ‘is’ but questions about ‘should’.

Is a love of peace over violence, freedom over slavery, ignorance over wisdom simply a matter of taste?

Yeah but I wouldn't really consider that "faith", more "opinions".

Like, I think the best moral code tends to be "try and maximize empathy" as at least for me that seems to usually leads to the best results.

Do I have some kind of objective proof that that's best? No, not really, it's a "feels" based judgement, but I don't think that's a "faith" based thing either, any more than me saying that "Donkey Kong Country 2 is the best game ever" would be.

We can objectively measure how close something is to some moral framework, but the weighting of that moral framework will eventually get subjective. I don't think subjectivity implies "faith".

I don't think that's quite an equivalent loss of "faith".

More equivalent would be where you see enough evidence of faked/false papers being published that you start believing that most papers are faked/false. More equivalent would be you concluding that (e.g) the FDA does not possess either the authority or expertise (or both) to ever correctly make any judgements about the safety of food or drugs. More equivalent would be your deciding that CDC doesn't actually understand how disease spreads and thus should be ignored.

(I'm aware that the latter two examples here sound suspiciously related to specific recent events/trends in the USA, but that's accidental and not intentional on my part)

This isn't true though. You're mixing up divine and human interpretations.

Divinity just "is". Existence is defensible. Human interpretation is necessarily always incomplete because you can't condense divinity into something measurable. It just doesn't make sense in human terms.

What we can do, and what faith entails, is that we can measure existence piecemeal and trust that it still fits together.

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