I am not happy with your topic title: "Faith vs Science". Why would you think it is necessary for faith and science to be at odds with each other? They are two different realms of human thought, despite a small number of possible areas of minor overlap.
Science works best when dealing with the physical universe, with the
natural. That is where you are able to observe, hypothesize, and test, the essential scientific activities.
Faith works best where you're dealing with things outside the physical universe, with the
supernatural. It is impossible to observe the supernatural or to test it. Sure, you could form hypotheses about the supernatural, but based on
what? And how could you ever possibly
test any of it?
And yet the most interesting questions for humanity lie outside the purview of of science, are too complex and nebulous for science. Faith is not as constrained as science, but what does it have to offer? The most interesting questions for humanity are outside the ability for science to address and outside the ability for faith to properly handle.
So, when you're just running of faith, what suffices? I keep remembering a line in a George C. Scott movie where he was a Calvinist trying to find his daughter lost in the Orange County sex trade (at least she was recruited at Knott's Berry Farm, though that's close to the LA border). When he described his religious beliefs to a sex-trade comrade, she described a questionable sex act some guy once wanted her to perform and commented somebody could get you to believe just about anything. Please do not refer Faith to this movie because she will absolutely hate it. It was even too sketchy for a non-Calvinist.
So, what evidence would faith require? None, actually. Whatever unsupported nonsense would suffice just so long as it seemed to agree with the believer's beliefs or else used the sources the believer trusts and with an interpretation that's not too different from what the believer cleaves to. Not really of much use if you are seeking the truth and not mere agreement with preconceived notions.
What would science require? Actual evidence, as we both know full well.
What about claims that those of faith make about the real world? Well, there's this philosopher of science, Larry Lauden, who criticized Judge Overton's ruling in the famous 1981 Arkansas "balanced treatment" law in
McLean v. Arkansas for making faulty definitions of what is scientific which will come back to haunt us. I learned of it from a radio show in which the ICR's Dr. Duane Gish used it to support creationism. He even sent me a xerox copy of that article when I wrote to him about it. Which is amazing to me because that article actually hammers several nails in "creation science's" coffin:
quote:
At various key points in the Opinion, Creationism is charged with being untestable, dogmatic (and thus non-tentative), and unfalsifiable. All three charges are of dubious merit. For instance, to make the interlinked claims that Creationism is neither falsifiable nor testable is to assert that Creationism makes no empirical assertions whatever. This is surely false. Creationists make a wide range of testable assertions about empirical matters
of fact.
Thus, as Judge Overton himself grants (apparently without seeing its implications), the creationists say that the earth is of very recent origin (say 6,000 to 20,000 years old); they argue that most of the geological features of the earth's surface are diluvial in character (i.e., products of the postulated worldwide Noachian deluge); they are committed to a large number of factual historical claims with which the Old Testament is replete; they assert the limited variability of species. They are committed to the view that, since animals and man were created at the same time, the human fossil record must be paleontologically co-extensive with the record of lower animals. It is fair to say that no one has shown how to reconcile such claims with the available evidence -- evidence which speaks persuasively to a long earth history, among other things.
In brief, these claims are testable, they have been tested, and they have failed those tests.
(Science at the Bar -- Causes for Concern by Larry Laudan, Science, Technology and Human Values 7, no. 41 (1982):16-19)
So then, faith has to operate by a double standard, albeit a fair one. Where faith makes an assertion on matters of faith, which are inherently untestable, then faith gets a free pass. But when faith makes an assertion or claim that deals with the real world, then that real-world assertion/claim must be tested against real-world evidence.
Similarly, Faith (the EvC member) can make whatever b*t-s**t c***y claim or assertion that she wants to make about matters of faith, but the moment she makes any kind of real-world prediction of real-world events, then she must provide actual real-world scientific evidence of it.
So basically this is what it boils down to. If you are making assertions that can only be supported by faith, then whatever b*t-s**t c***y "evidence" you want to offer must suffice. But if you are talking about real-world predictions that can indeed be observed and tested, then you absolutely need to provide some actual evidence. B*t-s**t c***y ramblings simply will not suffice.
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