Do Scientists Have "Faith" in the Same Sense some Christians do?

[McBell]

It's not my interpretation, it's what God has laid out to be.

bold empty claim that you have absolutely no way of substantiating.

 

[Vouthon]

Which of the fundamental ideas upon which the scientific method is based originated with Christianity?

The very concept of the universe operating according to pre-existent, immutable "physical laws" or the "laws of nature" courtesy of an underlying mathematical order, is a profoundly theological one derived from the Christian worldview: which presupposes the existence of a Supreme God who created the world and ordered it in a rational, comprehensible manner. And yes, the first forays into empiricism as well.

The earliest scientists like Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon, Newton et al were motivated to employ the scientific method for that overarching purpose. Their shared Christian worldview was not a mere unfortunate appendage to their scientific endeavours.

If I might quote the cosmologist and theoretical physicist Paul Davies:

The orthodox position in science is that the universe is governed by a fixed set of laws in the form of infinitely precise mathematical relationships imprinted on the universe from its birth. In addition, it is assumed that the physical world is affected by the laws, but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe — they are immutable.

It is not hard to see where this picture comes from: it is inherited from monotheism, which asserts that a rational being designed the universe according to a set of perfect laws. And the asymmetry between immutable laws and contingent states mirrors the asymmetry between God and nature: the universe depends utterly on God for its existence whereas God's existence does not depend on the universe.

Historians of science are well aware that Newton and his contemporaries believed that in doing science they were uncovering the divine plan for the universe in the form of its underlying mathematical order. As Scott Atran points out, the argument that science is based on faith is not new.

Evidently Western society is so steeped in monotheism that the monotheistic world view, which was appropriated by science, is now regarded as "obvious" and "natural." As a result, many scientists are unaware of its theological origin. Nor do they stop to think about the sweeping hidden assumptions they adopt when they subscribe to that scientific/theological world view, assumptions that are in fact are not shared by most other cultures.

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Sunstone was therefore correct ((ahem, as usual, ahem)) in arguing that: "Historically, Christianity was instrumental in shaping the intellectual environment from which the sciences sprang."

There's a reason why the Scientific Revolution took place in Early Modern Europe. It didn't pop out of a vacuum like a miraculous virgin birth: a long-standing intellectual climate and framework, characterised by a set of concrete assumptions derived from a cultural milieu shaped by Western Christianity, underpinned it. Earlier cultures like the classical Greeks, the Arab/Persian Muslims and the orthodox Byzantines made important contributions but the "revolution" did not occur in these civilizations in its fully developed form.

The purpose of Ancient Greek "science", after all, was to explain the natural world in ways that correlated with their ethical theories. It was not strictly speaking experimental, motivated to understand the natural order on its own terms, as modern science is.

In his Mechanics, for instance, Hero of Alexandria (10 AD – c. 70 AD) who was an important Roman era mathematician and engineer, states unambiguously and uncritically on the authority of Aristotle that heavy objects fall faster than light ones. Now, this is a fundamental error that could have easily been proven wrong were Hero to have engaged in the simplest of experiments. Yet Hero did not do this and nor did it occur to of his pagan, pre-Christian contemporaries to do it either. He and they simply accepted the authority of Aristotle on this question, rather than subjecting this theory to an empirical test.

It was not until the Christian worldview started to loosen stringent attachment to the ideas of Aristotle, that a Christian philosopher named John Philoponus (490–570) was in a position to actually perform one of the earliest recorded experiments to support his theories (which were critical of Aristotle courtesy of a set of Christian presuppositions), by dropping a heavy and light ball in the sixth century AD.

Philoponus discovered that both balls fell at almost the same speed: the objects (regardless of their mass) experienced the same acceleration when in a state of free fall. He had uncovered the equivalence principle, one of the fundamental principles of modern physics: drop two different weights, and (ignoring wind resistance) they will hit the ground at the same time.

This experiment demonstrated that the Aristotelians were wrong and showed that, to truly understand the laws of nature, empirical investigation was essential.

See:


John Philoponus (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

John Philoponus, a Christian philosopher, scientist, and theologian who lived approximately from 490 to 570, is also known as John the Grammarian or John of Alexandria. Although the Aristotelian-Neoplatonic tradition was the source of his intellectual roots and concerns, he was an original thinker who eventually broke with that tradition in many important respects, both substantive and methodological, and cleared part of the way which led to more critical and empirical approaches in the natural sciences.

The intense incompatibilities between pagan learning and Christian dogma are readily visible on the philosophical surface of Philoponus' work as he struggles to hold his faith accountable to reason...

He complements this with a remarkable freedom of spirit, which in turn allows him to cast off the fetters of authority as a criterion of truth, be it philosophical or theological. Philoponus' works were translated into Arabic, Latin and Syriac, and he influenced later thinkers such as Bonaventure, Gersonides, Buridan, Oresme and Galileo.

Philosophical, social, and religious parameters are likely to have supplied conditions which allowed him to carry forward his unprecedented and unparalleled act of emancipation from a widely accepted intellectual tradition.

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Here is what Philoponus wrote concerning his experiment with the heavy and light balls:

"...But this [view of Aristotle] is completely erroneous, and our view may be completely corroborated by actual observation more effectively than by any sort of verbal argument. For if you let fall from the same height two weights, one many times heavier than the other you will see that the ratio of the times required for the motion does not depend [solely] on the weights, but that the difference in time is very small. ..."

— John Philoponus' refutation of the Aristotelian claim that the elapsed time for a falling body is inversely proportional to its weight​

Philoponus also believed that objects could move in a vacuum and argued against antiperistasis (the untested Aristotelian theory that an object is kept in motion by air which travels from the front to the back, giving it a push).

Why did Philoponus reject this (as we would discover in time with our modern understanding of momentum) positively erroneous Aristotelian idea that his pagan forebears had simply endorsed on the authority of the great man? You guessed it, his Christian faith which he could not reconcile with Aristotelian ideas:


John Philoponus - Wikipedia

John Philoponus (/fɪˈlɒpənəs/; Ἰωάννης ὁ Φιλόπονος; c. 490 – c. 570), also known as John the Grammarian or John of Alexandria, was an Alexandrian philologist, Aristotelian commentator and Christian theologian.

In the latter work Philoponus became one of the earliest thinkers to reject Aristotle's dynamics and propose the "theory of impetus":[4] i.e., an object moves and continues to move because of an energy imparted in it by the mover and ceases the movement when that energy is exhausted. This insightful theory was the first step towards the concept of inertia in modern physics.

A rigorous, sometimes polemical writer and an original thinker who was controversial in his own time, John Philoponus broke from the Aristotelian–Neoplatonic tradition, questioning methodology and eventually leading to empiricism in the natural sciences.

Later in life Philoponus turned to Christian apologetics, arguing against the eternity of the world, a theory which formed the basis of pagan attack of the Christian doctrine of Creation.

Around 550 he wrote a theological work On the Creation of the World as a commentary on the Bible’s story of creation using the insights of Greek philosophers and Basil the Great. In this work he transfers his theory of impetus to the motion of the planets, whereas Aristotle had proposed different explanations for the motion of heavenly bodies and for earthly projectiles. Thus Philoponus' theological work is recognized in the history of science as the first attempt at a unified theory of dynamics.

He introduced a new period of scientific thought based heavily on three premises: (1) The universe is a product of one single God, (2) the heavens and the earth have the same physical properties, (3) and the stars are not divine.[7]

With these principles Philoponus went after his pagan rival, Simplicius of Cilicia, by questioning Aristotle's' view of dynamics and cosmology.[7] He argued that motion can occur in a void and that the velocity of a falling object is not based on its weight.[7]

He also held that God created all matter with its physical properties and with natural laws that would allow matter to progress from a state of chaos to an organized state forming the present universe.[7] What remains of his writings indicate that he used the same didactic methods of reasoning that modern science uses and that he performed genuine experiments.[7]


(Continued....)​

 

[Vouthon]

As a result even the atheist cosmologist Professor Sean Carroll, in his book The Big Picture (which is about promoting a naturalist-atheistic view of life) concedes that:


The Big Picture

"...In the sixth century, John Philoponus, a philosopher and theologian living in Egypt, began the journey from Aristotle to our present understanding of motion....This brings us remarkably close to the modern idea of 'inertia' - the concept that bodies will move uniformly unless acted upon. In the fourteenth century, Jean Buridan, a French cleric, came up with a quantitative formula equating the impetus with the weight of an object times its velocity..."

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And what intellectual framework could possibly inspired the Catholic priest Jean Buridan to come up with his ingenious formula that improved on Philoponus' theory and brought us even closer to contemporary physics? Hmm, I wonder......


Theory of impetus - Wikipedia

In the 14th century, Jean Buridan postulated the notion of motive force, which he named impetus...Buridan gives his theory a mathematical value: impetus = weight x velocity

Buridan's pupil Dominicus de Clavasio in his 1357 De Caelo, as follows:

"When something moves a stone by violence, in addition to imposing on it an actual force, it impresses in it a certain impetus. In the same way gravity not only gives motion itself to a moving body, but also gives it a motive power and an impetus, ...".
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Buridan pointed out that neither Aristotle's unmoved movers nor Plato's souls are in the Bible, so he applied impetus theory to the eternal rotation of the celestial spheres by extension of a terrestrial example of its application to rotary motion in the form of a rotating millwheel that continues rotating for a long time after the originally propelling hand is withdrawn, driven by the impetus impressed within it.[10] He wrote on the celestial impetus of the spheres as follows:

"God, when He created the world, moved each of the celestial orbs as He pleased, and in moving them he impressed in them impetuses which moved them without his having to move them any more...And those impetuses which he impressed in the celestial bodies were not decreased or corrupted afterwards, because there was no inclination of the celestial bodies for other movements. Nor was there resistance which would be corruptive or repressive of that impetus."[11]
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The Buridan impetus theory developed one of the most important thought-experiments in the history of science, namely the so-called 'tunnel-experiment', so important because it brought oscillatory and pendulum motion within the pale of dynamical analysis and understanding in the science of motion for the very first time and thereby also established one of the important principles of classical mechanics.

The pendulum was to play a crucially important role in the development of mechanics in the 17th century, and so more generally was the axiomatic principle of Galilean, Huygenian and Leibnizian dynamics to which the tunnel experiment also gave rise, namely that a body rises to the same height from which it has fallen, a principle of gravitational potential energy. As Galileo Galilei expressed this fundamental principle of his dynamics in his 1632 Dialogo:
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As the historian James Hannam notes:

"...Jean Buridan realised that this led to a radical implication of his theory: ‘Impetus’, he said, ‘would last forever if it were not diminished and corrupted by an opposing resistance or a tendency to contrary motion.’ Therefore, if there is no air resistance, such as in a vacuum, then an object will continue moving forever. Looking to the heavens, Buridan suggested that this might be the case for the planets orbiting the earth...”

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As an addendum, see also:

The Experimental Revolution. Though the ideas of the Greeks, as expressed by Aristotle (384 BCE–322 BCE), persisted until the time of Galileo, there were many who seriously questioned much of it, and even did experiments to show that Aristotle was wrong. John Philoponus (490–570) (John the Grammarian) experimentally disproved Aristotle's assertion that heavy bodies fall faster than lighter ones. This experiment (dropping heavy and light balls from a height) was repeated by others, including Simon Stevin (1548/49–1620). Their work constituted a gradual revolution in how physics was done, one that showed the importance of deliberate experiments designed to study natural processes. Previous physics had mostly relied on passive observation of phenomena.
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[atanu]

Last, some people like to argue that the sciences are based on scientific axioms which are equivalent to "things taken on faith". Yet, scientists would most likely discard or modify axioms that conflicted with experimental observations, but people who take things on faith tend to value doing so steadfastly, even in the face of conflicting reasoning and evidence. Hence, there seems to be a distinction between how scientific axioms and things taken on faith are treated by their respective communities.

For those, and for other reasons, the criticism of some Christians that scientific explanations require as much or more faith as religious explanations seems to me shallow and simplistic.

Your thoughts?

I am not a Christian and my profession is science. But I consider spirituality to be of more profound significance for one's own welfare than what science can offer.

I think that this subject is not so simple so as to be amenable for easy analysis and a decision this way or that way. There was a time when Einstein's deterministic and Bohr's probabilistic axioms existed side by side. It took Bell's theorem and Alain Aspect's experimental results to eventually lead to Bohr's axiom to prevail. So, it is knowledge and experience that resolve these issues and not faith.

Similarly, many spiritual axioms need personal experience and/or great wisdom before those can be comprehended and beneficially adopted.

This fight about science and religion is like a two men fighting till death professing belief in two different faiths. The fight is not inherent in two religions. The fight is about two ego selves.