MATTHEW WATKINSON • WEB: http://www.fishsnorkel.com • TWITTER: http://twitter.com/fishsnorkel
ARE EVIDENCE AND FAITH MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE? “A feeling is deep because we hold the accompanying thought to be deep. But the deep thought can nevertheless be very far from the truth, as is, for example, every metaphysical thought.” Friedrich Nietzsche
SUMMARY
Yes, they are.
INTRODUCTION As far as I'm concerned, the real problem with faith is the assumed omniscience. To generate certainty the faithful must assume they know, even when they don't. Early philosophers decided planet Earth was flat for example. They decided a massive three dimensional globe was actually a massive two dimensional pancake and they were quite certain. They were 100% wrong and 100% certain and that can only have involved a whole lot of not knowing they didn't know. They simply decided they knew something they'd made up. Eventually, science detonated the pancake hypothesis like candy floss wrapped round a grenade of course. Essentially, knowledge (the globe) replaced faith (the pancake), but isn’t that always the way? Doesn’t knowledge only ever replace faith? “...history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain." Thomas Huxley
Yes. It does. "For what is the history of every science but the history of the elimination of the notion of creative, or other interferences, with the natural order of the phenomena which are the subjectmatter of that science?” Thomas Huxley
Faith may be a cuddly refuge for factless opinion, but in the world of real knowledge, evidence only ever replaces faith. And the relationship is remarkably simple: “…there would seem to be an inverse relation between supernatural and natural knowledge. As the latter has widened, gained in precision and in trustworthiness, so has the former shrunk, grown vague and questionable; as the one has more and more filled the sphere of action, so has the other retreated into the region of meditation, or vanished behind the screen of mere verbal recognition.” Thomas Huxley
An increase in evidence always accompanies a decrease in faith. And it's a linear relationship, because faith and science are mutually exclusive. If you know something because of evidence you don't need faith anymore, and evidence only increases with time. You know more than you did when you were born (hopefully) and humanity knows more than it did when it lived in caves and the trend continues. Faith is retreating all the time. It's being squeezed out of the secular world into the supernatural safe zone beyond physical reality. Which is exactly why it will only disappear when we do. Supernatural fantasy is beyond evidence, it's beyond science and, thus, it will always be there for those who need it. “If one subtracts the added elements of thought from the deep feeling, what remains is intense feeling, which guarantees nothing at all about knowledge except itself, just as strong belief proves only its own strength, not the truth of what is believed.” Friedrich Nietzsche Human, All Too Human
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