The Value of Belief in Scientific Research
I’ve been toying around with the idea of writing this post for some time.
I am, as some of the readers of this site know, a scientist by day. It’s pretty uncommon for a scientist to believe in any sort of deity, and it’s even less common for that belief to be something they broadcast. Belief in a deity is unsupported by data, and that means it’s not something you talk about in scientific discourse.
I’ve chosen my words pretty carefully there, though. Lots of scientists don’t believe in any deity, and that’s good for them and consistent with their careers. More power to them.
However, there seems to be some degree of perception that in order to be a self-consistent religious person, you have to reject certain elements of science, or in order to be a self-consistent scientist, you have to reject religion.
I want to explain why this is not only not the case, but that there are unique advantages to having the perspective of a religious scientist as part of your research group. That’s not to say that religious scientists should be seen as “better” than atheist scientists. We’re different, and by combining the differences of scientists with different creeds, science is enhanced.
A lot of people these days have a belief in science as some kind of magical religion of supported statements. I have a surprise for you: for a long, long time, the data produced by scientists “supported” all manner of notions that are not true or at least unsupported today. This includes, but is not limited to, the notion of deities.
What is considered to be true by scientists varies with the observational techniques that are accepted by society. There are many things taken as dogma by today’s society, and touted by many who see science as a replacement for religion, that will turn out not to be true in coming years. This is a fact of science; the data collected is constantly revised, and techniques are constantly improved.
Science, dear reader, is not a set of beliefs. It is not a set of facts. These beliefs and facts are produced by a process known as science. You cannot do things in the name of science, because science, simply, is a methodology. It can be used for the formation of ideologies, but it is not itself an ideology.
The perception of science as an ideology may even be a bad thing for the scientific community, as outsiders with less understanding of how science is conducted come to treat our observations as dogmatic, and anything that challenges them as crackpot. This is a dangerous precedent that I already see play out on a semi-regular basis. This is mostly caused by popularizers of science who are not themselves particularly accomplished scientists, a few of whom I can name, but will not. You have almost certainly read something by one of these people.
Likewise, anti-science ideologies turn science into something more than it ought to be. They suggest that science means one thing or another; science says this or that which challenges their worldview. No! People who say this are not necessarily wrong in their beliefs, they are wrong in their understanding of science. It is not a body of facts. Science is a tool, and when it produces facts that disagree with you, it is not science that is to blame for that.
Let me describe the process that is science. Many of you will say that science is the process of using data to support hypotheses. This is wrong; that is half of what science is, the half in which collected data is analyzed and discussed by the scientific community before an often flawed consensus is reached on the conclusion. This is the second step of science.
The first step of science involves supposition. It involves looking at the data that exists and conclusions that have been made, and finding gaps in knowledge. Then, based on the “shape” of that gap, the scientist supposes a possibility that would explain the question they have. For example, we do not know if there is a fundamental particle that determines the mass of objects within the universe. A group of physicists asked this question, and developed a theory that supposed the idea of a boson (the Higgs Boson) that would be involved in determining mass. There is no more evidence to support the idea of this boson than there is to support the idea of any deity, and yet large sums of money are being spent towards its discovery. In this part, scientists must choose to spend their money and time entirely on the pursuit of their faith in unsupported ideas.
Often, the data that a scientist collects will fail to support their ideas. This does not mean that their ideas are false—at least, not always. It may mean that they screwed up the procedure, or their technique isn’t sensitive enough, or high power enough, or that they happen to have been flummoxed by a confounding happenstance, a spontaneous event that they could not observe or expect. Undiscouraged, the scientist must often to continue to pursue his or her idea even after experiments have failed to confirm it.
Eventually, the scientist will either give up, and say something like, “The data fails to support my idea…,” or will find data that DOES support the idea. Please note that unless the hypothesis is binary, you cannot say the hypothesis is untrue. It is very hard to many any conclusions from a negative result, which frequently makes them unpublishable. Only when your question is a question like, “Is the light on?” and you suspect it is not, can you determine you were wrong. If it’s something like, “Is there another planet with intelligent life,” the fact that you haven’t found one despite complete sky surveys does not mean you were wrong. It just means you failed to find one.
It’s only in the second part of science that you start to support these hypotheses with data. Once you’ve designed, tested, validated, and repeated your experiment you get to publish it. 90% of your time is spent on doing the things in the last sentence. 10% of the time is spent discussing results and explaining how they support your hypothesis. The facts that you have made are often an item of low concern when you are in pursuit of more facts. Furthermore, there are those who will question the scientist’s support for their hypothesis, requiring further experiments which must be conducted despite outside skepticism about the findings. The scientist must continue to have faith in order to succeed; the existence of doubt in others is not a reason to be discouraged. No scientific discovery is accepted by the entire community immediately. These things take time.
At some point, though, the finding enters a textbook. It’s generally thought to be true. It might not be; the future might hold doubts for it, and future scientists may overturn it. But it’s only at the end of a hypothesis’s long life that it finds itself in a book, supported by data.
Before that, it survives only in the scientist’s faith. And a religious scientist has a unique perspective, because the sort of faith that he or she has is different from the sort of faith that atheist scientists have. Atheist scientists frequently support scientific hypotheses as articles of faith, whereas religious scientists support hypotheses that our technology cannot currently test. Both find their suppositions to be embattled in different ways, and are forced to develop mental tools for supporting and defending their ideas from critics.
Because each sort of scientist has their own different ideas to defend, and different strategies to defend them, it takes collaboration between atheist scientists and religious scientists to evaluate the best strategies for defending and supporting different hypotheses. Maybe a religious scientist will keep going when others might give up, and make an amazing discovery. Maybe an atheist scientist will know when to stop, and save a lot of time. Or, maybe, those positions will be reversed.
The important part, my point entirely, is that both kinds of scientists know they have to work together. They HAVE to collaborate in order to stick with the very difficult process of establishing hypotheses and collecting data. They can’t busy themselves with arguments over whether or not science supports their spiritual beliefs, because there are answerable questions that demand more immediate attention. They also cannot deify science, because on a regular basis science disappoints and discourages them. Science, for all kinds of scientists, must be a job, and not an ideology. They must question it, not put it on a pedestal.
In light of that, it’s vital for the scientific community to welcome everyone who is willing to pursue the scientific method of investigation in earnest, regardless of their beliefs or biology, sexuality or skin colour. Those who tout science as a worldview should learn from this, as should those who challenge science, for even they make this pursuit into more of a juggernaut than it truly is.
So, whatever it is you believe in, I pray there will one day be a way to test it!
