[bigfoot13442]

The last thing I want to do is start a flame war, but I don't see anyone on here criticizing you for putting your faith in science. I would like to have thought that the Hacker News community would be above unwarranted comments such as this.

[sjwright]

Short of actually taking the first two paragraphs literally, I don't think you could have misunderstood the point of my post more.

And no, I don't put faith in science. Faith means belief without evidence. I accept science. I acknowledge that scientists are human, and that humans can be fallible, corrupt, egotistical and plain old stupid. And I admire the Scientific Method for doing an excellent job of counteracting most of our human failings.

[stephen_g]

Faith does not mean belief without evidence, it is more belief in something not seen. That does not imply a lack of evidence.

For example, you have faith in the efficacy of a pharmaceutical product based on the fact that you trust the peer reviewers of the reports of its clinical trials, and the reputation of the journals those reports are published in.

Without faith you could not accept any scientific conclusion unless you had directly observed the experiments they were based on. Neither could you believe anything on the news or any historical event you hadn't observed.

[sjwright]

> Without faith you could not accept any scientific conclusion

Nonsense. I don't need faith to assign various claims varying degrees of trust and confidence.

[stephen_g]

Perhaps we're just arguing semantics, but I think that is a large part of exactly what faith is!

Or perhaps you just dislike the term because it's often used in a religious context?

[sjwright]

You might be arguing semantics, but I'm not. I see a gulf of difference between any definition of "faith" and how I derive confidence in science.

No definition of faith I'm aware of relates to confidence based on weight of evidence, or balance of probabilities.

To use your example of pharmaceutical efficacy, I take a pill with the expectation that it will elicit results comparable to its stated claim. I hope that it works. I'm happy if it does work. But my worldview won't be shattered if it doesn't.

[nitrogen]

So there's evidence-based faith, and faith-based faith?

[andrewflnr]

There's pretty-good-guess faith and blind faith. Mathematical axioms and believing what other people tell you about science you haven't observed yourself are examples of the former. Belief in God varies between the two from person to person.

[nitrogen]

There's a way of formalizing this, so we don't have to rely on the imprecise and loaded word "faith": Bayesian probability, e.g. as described on http://lesswrong.com. See also http://rationality.org.

[bigfoot13442]

The definition of faith is, "Complete trust or confidence in someone or something". It has nothing to do with whether or not there is evidence supporting the thing you have faith in.

[sjwright]

Arguing dictionary definitions is so tedious.

That's just one of numerous definitions of the word, a historically legitimate definition to be sure. Sadly any innocent use of the word for that purpose is -- to my mind at least -- tainted by the other, socially dominant meaning.

And anyway, even using your cherry-picked definition, I still say I don't have faith in science, because I can't afford it "complete trust or confidence". While I do think the core principles of science are the best tools we have to describe the natural world, even these core principles can not be immune to questioning.

[jlgreco]

I am sure he doesn't have complete and total trust or confidence in evolution; evolution is after all, falsifiable. A rabbit in the Pre-Cambrian would surely rock his boat. The boat has already been rocked many times before, and course adjustments were made based on the new information conveyed by that rocking.

It just so happens however that none of the things that would kill the theory have ever actually been shown.