Belief and Assumptions
Skeptics frequently talk about belief. Their view is that people who subscribe to a worldview that is not completely scientific do so because they have unsubstantiated (and unverifiable) beliefs, whereas those who subscribe to a scientific worldview do not have unsubstantiated beliefs.
I’ve pointed out previously (
More on Assumptions) that science is actually based on more assumptions then most religions. Personally, I do not use the word belief in this context. This is not just some politically correct name change, but because the two concepts are different. If someone says they believe there is a tiger in the room, you would expect them to exhibit certain behaviour patterns, for instance fear and anxiety, and they would attempt to get out of the way. If they don’t do this you may wonder what the nature of their belief is. On the other hand, an assumption is a view that is taken to be true without verification. Science makes many assumptions, some of what I’ve written about previously.
It is, however, important to test your assumptions. And here lies the difficulty. If you make the assumption that the scientific method is infallible, and is the only method of verifying whether something is true, then how can you test this? You can’t use the scientific method to test the scientific method. If, on the other hand, you believe that God exists and interacts with the world then how can you test this? Well, you can but you have to ask yourself what constitutes proof. I remember reading about a professor in the UK who was brought up in a strict Jewish household who told a story that in his teens he started to question the religion and decided to put it to the test. On Yon Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, pious Jews fast and spend the best part of the day in synagogue. As people arrived at the synagogue he sat on the steps eating a ham sandwich. Ham, of course, is forbidden to Jews and eating it on Yon Kippur constituted a double affront. He waited, he said, for the blast. A bolt of lightning or a voice telling him that what he was doing was wrong. Nothing happened and he said he became a non-believer from then on.
Now, you could say he was putting the assumption to the test but it is important, and one of the ironies about any tests (including scientific tests), that you have to know something about what you are testing in order to test it. This professor’s understanding of God and how he worked in the world was faulty. If he went to a doctor and the doctor advised him to stop eating butter due to high cholesterol, would he test the doctor by eating a slice of buttered bread on the steps of the hospital and waiting for the heart attack?
You can test assumptions, even such assumptions as a belief in God, by adopting a certain attitude and mindset and observing the world around you in an objective, and observant, way. In fact punctuated all through religious literature is the idea of testing faith. A test has an outcome – it either passes or fails. You test your faith in the same way as you test anything else. You take actions and monitor the result.
Richard Dawkins in his book “The God Delusion” ridicules the passage in the Bible (a similar account is in the Koran) where Abraham is about to sacrifice his oldest child. I won’t go into the details here – that is for another blog entry – but it is a test in essence no different from a scientific test. As I said, it is in the nature of any test that you have to have an understanding of what you are testing before you can test it. Richard Dawkins has no understanding of how God works in the world and so is unqualified to test it.
