Thinking About Science

Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too.
PAUL DAVIES
"Taking Science on Faith," The New York Times, November 24, 2004.

I have been thinking about Davies op-ed piece in the New York Times. Some comments:

Clearly some scientists are religious, and most scientists of the past were religious, and thought that scientific laws were divine creations. Most scientists would be willing to test hypotheses of divine order if it were clear how to do so. Without tests, hypotheses are not scientific, which does not mean that they are wrong, but rather that they are not amenable to science which depends on such tests.

Scientists seek explanations for observed order, and sometimes seek to find order in the data, but science does not presuppose that all things are ordered. Quantum theory famously suggests that some phenomena are inherently unpredictable, while the Heisenberg uncertainty principle holds that some phenomena are inherently incapable of being completely observed.

Statistics has been successful in defining ways to find order in collections of random events. But I don't think scientists believe that science will ever enable us to predict actions in the behavioral complexity of social, biological or chemical interactions -- which of hundreds of millions of babies born each year will turn out to be presidents, how an individual neuron will develop and behave over its lifetime, or which atom will combine with which other atoms in a chemical reaction.

I would suggest that science does not presuppose lawful behavior, but rather seeks order and pattern in observations that may lend themselves to scientific exploration and explanation. Great scientists often find such order where it has not been noticed by others, or find ways to exploit such patterns that had not been recognized by others.

I would suggest that we can all benefit from the effort to perceive patterns of behavior and to understand reasons for the emergence of such patterns. That approach can prove useful in the office, the economy, and in politics, as well as in science.