Defending Science with Religion.

In a reply on Mr. Liu’s blog: http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/485ea879010003xs#comment
For me, the objectivity and credibility of science are things I will certainly defend. One extremely naive reason for defending them is this: if science is not trustworthy and objective, then what is more trustworthy and objective? If there are things in the world that can be trusted, science is surely one of the best candidates—unless one believes that nothing in the world is reliable at all, in which case thoroughgoing relativism, skepticism, and nihilism are all unassailable. I am willing to defend science in a manner similar to Kant’s defense of religion—religion brings you hope; if not in religion, where else can hope be entrusted? Believing in God is theoretically non-contradictory and practically satisfying; there is no downside, so why not believe?—I feel that this seemingly weak approach is precisely the best way to defend religion, and perhaps defending science is similar. This line of thought may seem childish; Teacher, please don’t laugh. A simple and naive line of thought is not necessarily the shallowest. Otherwise, what can be used to defend science? Whether it is deductive logic or inductive logic or the like, these are all using science’s own methods to defend science itself. Such a defense may ensure that scientific theory is internally coherent, which is certainly important, but once one goes further and tries to defend oneself on the basis of self-consistency, one can no longer use one’s own internal methods. This is obvious in logic: if the theory I use to defend science is itself part of science, then it cannot escape circular reasoning in any case. To defend science, one must use non-scientific means; to defend reason, one must use non-rational means. As I see it, such non-scientific means come down to two: the artistic and the religious. The artistic approach is to support science with “beauty,” and this is quite effective. Many great scientists have been engaged in scientific exploration not because of a demand for logical positivism, but because of a pursuit of beauty. The natural laws revealed by science are indeed extremely beautiful; I am very interested in mathematics and physics, and I personally have a deep appreciation of the beauty of science. The other means is the religious one: using faith to defend science. This approach is in fact already implied by many contemporary scientists; in an era when religion’s reputation had not yet been ruined, many great scientists expressed it quite bluntly. But I fear that nowadays very few philosophers of science would say it so bluntly—defending science with religion sounds like sheer fantasy. Yet I think that if one wants to break out of the strange circle of using science to defend science, then without taking some off-the-beaten-path route, it simply will not work……

Latest comments

• Gu

  2006-06-23 12:36:37

  Put differently, the defense of science cannot rely only on “pure reason”; in the end, it must also rely on “practical reason.” Kant’s contribution to the philosophy of science is by no means exhausted by a mere “deduction theory” (“献演论”)! His “thing-in-itself,” “pure reason/practical reason,” and “sensibility/understanding/reason” are all highly illuminating.

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.