“ faith in data, science, and evidence as the standard bases for decision making “ like all faith requires a willing suspension of disbelief in the style of Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, nicknamed Cunctator, the delayer. Wait and see before you make up your mind. In the case of religion, it’s Pascal’s Wager (“what have you got to lo…
“ faith in data, science, and evidence as the standard bases for decision making “ like all faith requires a willing suspension of disbelief in the style of Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, nicknamed Cunctator, the delayer. Wait and see before you make up your mind. In the case of religion, it’s Pascal’s Wager (“what have you got to lose?”), but more often strong religious conviction is grounded in a need to stop trying to answer the great mysteries of people’s lives on a case by case basis and be able to arrive, instead, at a comprehensive internally consistent framework for all situations. (Except for the occasional “please, Lord, just this once?”)
In the case of science it is a tolerance for a provisional view of how things are. A great example is the
Kuhnian paradigmatic revolution that overturned a century of settled questions on the large scale features of the Earth. Before 1969 the profession of faith was “the Earth moves up and down, but never back and forth” was the short-short of the first edition of my undergraduate historical geology textbook. The second edition that I taught the same course with 1971 was like “yeah, some up and down but mainly back and forth.”
There was very little in the way of rearguard defiance in defense of the previous orthodoxy. Even old bulls who made their names in geosynclines as the central model mostly bit their tongues and muttered about how the new plate tectonics model failed to resolve some outstanding problems around the edges that were or were not going to be the clincher for some minor sect of the Old Creed in the former debate. Secretly, they were thinking, YOUR turn will come.
The distinction between the religious view and the scientific view is the degree of ambiguity tolerance and the ability to ignore much of the messiness that arises from the more complex environments where they have arrived. In a relatively simpler environment there is a natural tendency to reduce the anxiety arising from uncertainty to a simple story of personal agency--God approves of the and disapproves of that. In a relatively more complex environment that approach won’t stretch to fit.
“ faith in data, science, and evidence as the standard bases for decision making “ like all faith requires a willing suspension of disbelief in the style of Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, nicknamed Cunctator, the delayer. Wait and see before you make up your mind. In the case of religion, it’s Pascal’s Wager (“what have you got to lose?”), but more often strong religious conviction is grounded in a need to stop trying to answer the great mysteries of people’s lives on a case by case basis and be able to arrive, instead, at a comprehensive internally consistent framework for all situations. (Except for the occasional “please, Lord, just this once?”)
In the case of science it is a tolerance for a provisional view of how things are. A great example is the
Kuhnian paradigmatic revolution that overturned a century of settled questions on the large scale features of the Earth. Before 1969 the profession of faith was “the Earth moves up and down, but never back and forth” was the short-short of the first edition of my undergraduate historical geology textbook. The second edition that I taught the same course with 1971 was like “yeah, some up and down but mainly back and forth.”
There was very little in the way of rearguard defiance in defense of the previous orthodoxy. Even old bulls who made their names in geosynclines as the central model mostly bit their tongues and muttered about how the new plate tectonics model failed to resolve some outstanding problems around the edges that were or were not going to be the clincher for some minor sect of the Old Creed in the former debate. Secretly, they were thinking, YOUR turn will come.
The distinction between the religious view and the scientific view is the degree of ambiguity tolerance and the ability to ignore much of the messiness that arises from the more complex environments where they have arrived. In a relatively simpler environment there is a natural tendency to reduce the anxiety arising from uncertainty to a simple story of personal agency--God approves of the and disapproves of that. In a relatively more complex environment that approach won’t stretch to fit.