A Matter of Faith

"All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed... to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin." ~ Paul Davies

What a profound statement from someone who is so anti-theistic. It is amazing in this age to see a naturalistic scientist admit that science, at its very foundation, must be taken on faith but he is absolutely right. Science proceeds on the assumption that the universe is governed by rational laws, yet when you follow reason back to the very foundation of science, the laws of physics, reason abandons you for within a naturalistic framework there is no rational explanation for why these laws can be rational. The laws of physics are considered a "given" that "just appeared" at the formation of the universe. Random occurrences cannot explain the rational bedrock that science uses to reason everything else. The Argument from Reason points out that naturalism cannot provide an adequate explanation of why we trust that the universe is governed by rational laws and why we trust that we have the mental capacity to discover and understand said laws.

So science and religion are not mutually exclusive spheres as some would like to believe. Religion does take faith, but I and many others believe that there is scientific, historical, archaeological, and philosophical evidence that makes this leap of faith not quite as large as atheists would have us believe. Atheists and naturalistic science also take leaps of faith but very few can admit it like Davies does. That is a start.

By His Grace,
Taylor