That Annoying Science vs. Religion Debate Rages On...

I found "Taking Science on Faith," a recent op-ed in the NY Times really annoying. Paul Davies, a cosmologist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University (U of A's rival!) argues in that column that science is ultimately faith-based just like religion. All of scientists' research endeavors, Davies says, are based on a faith that the universe is an ordered place, and is "governed by immutable... mathematical laws of unspecified origin." Without the belief that such order exists to be discovered, he argues, one could not be a scientist.

I strongly disagree with Davies' implicit characterization of the mathematical laws of physics, on which he bases much of his argument. Perhaps the problem is with the literal way he seems to understand the word "law." In a social context, social activity unfolds according to some pre-existing set of laws, with the result of social order. For example, I drive my car on the right side of the road in the U.S.A. because it is the law to do so, and I stop at red lights, because of the law, and as a result, I've never been in any messy, disordered car crashes. Thank goodness for the law. But in physics, the mathematical relationships we call laws are simply descriptions of the order we observe existing in nature all around us. The heavenly bodies form and gravitate the way that they do, and mathematics is just a convenient shorthand to describe their motions in a concise and general fashion. Davies takes an essentialist viewpoint of science, in which mathematical laws somehow precede the invention of the universe and at which point they are "plugged in" to the universal machine to make it run.

Believing in order does not require a leap of faith on the part of the scientist. Order is an observational fact, which rigorous science describes in a unified framework we colloquially call "laws". Perhaps most importantly, it certainly doesn't require any leaps of faith to appreciate the majesty and beauty of nature around us, and to be amazed by existence.