Poop Shute

Richard Dawkins Cracks Me Up

What I love about Dawkins, and other secular humanists like him, is that even though they are very much opposed to religion, and are vociferous in their quest against it, they are constantly saying "I could be wrong."

Again and again in several interviews I've seen him say things like "one day, they very well may prove it."

To me, that's the elegant beauty of not subscribing to a "faith." There's a certain flexibility in not putting all your stock in one explanation for the entirety of existence. As tiny as we are we know we can never really hope to know or understand it all, so to me the attempt to know and understand whatever we can through testing and observation is as much explanation as I can hope for, and certainly more explanation than I'd ever need. This to me, is a lack of faith, but it has been put to me that even belief in science is its own faith. The idea being that we can't ever really know anything for certain, so some faith is involved in any belief. I sort of agree, but it's faith with some conditions on it.

I do fully understand that believing in science itself requires it's own kind of faith, especially for a layperson like myself. I mean, I wasn't in the lab, doing the research, performing the tests and gathering the evidence first hand. So, it is a form of faith that I accept what science tells me is true. BUT it is a faith with one caveat. Anyone can test science. If I so choose, I could contact a scientist, go to his lab, read his research and see the evidence he yielded in specific terms to derive the theory I now accept as true. Or better than that, I can repeat his experiments and observe his results firsthand for myself.

So, in that case I am now a scientist myself, not a secondhand believer. Even then, my acceptance of the meaning of those results also requires a certain kind of faith. I have faith that the correlation that I found is actually true. I have faith that what the evidence seems to tell me is correct. BUT there is another caveat. If another scientist comes along with totally new research that completely refutes mine, and it is undeniable, then I will admit that what I thought before was wrong, and move forward.

Because of these reasons I have listed above, I am to the point of being uncomfortable using faith in this context. Faith in science is a logical thing, based on measurable, testable evidence. Whereas faith in anything spiritual is an entirely emotional thing. It somehow "feels" right to a person. Without anything more compelling than a book, one can just decide that something makes sense. One might say science can work the same way to a layperson, in that nothing more compelling than a book can change my mind. But I accept what that book tells me with the aforementioned caveats in mind. Many holy books come with no such support, or even any evidence of original authorship or purity of translation over the years. In many cases we have no way of knowing who actually wrote it, or what the precise meaning of their words was in the beginning. It could have been written by a con artist and/or been distorted by the personal moods or intentions of any number of scribes over the generations, yet the words are accepted and believed, even venerated and applied as law in some cases.

The point to me is that "faith" is a word that has taken on certain connotations that make it inappropriate with regard to science. Just like the words virginity and molest have completely changed in our modern times. Virginity used to mean purity of body and spirit, and virgin used to be synonymous with nun, and now as long as a girl hasn't had vaginal intercourse, she's a virgin. To molest someone used to be to annoy, to harass, to interfere with, but now we all automatically think about children being sexually abused. Like those words, faith has become more specific than it used to be.

To be clear, this is not an attack on religion, or religious people. This is just my own observations on a certain word. For me, faith is an emotional belief in something without any evidence. I neither condemn nor condone it. I have many friends that are strong in their faith, and that works just fine for them. I take no stance on it, like Mr Dawkins does. I'm just stating, clearly, and mostly for my own purposes what faith means to me.