The Struggle of Faith | Biblical Series: Exodus

Here they are. They just saw the most incredible miracle of all: He transcended even the ten plagues, the crushing of Pharaoh's army. They are walking through a sea that allows them dry land. Now they fear God and believe in God, and believe in Moses. They already have faith in both for at least... yes, this will last, right? You can count it in hours. That is just, again, it's such a... it's brilliant that it has that line.

Hey, guess what? They just saw this; they have faith for her. Yeah, totally finite amount of time. Miracles don't work, and people should not rely on them for faith. Well, that's the difference between faith and proof in some sense, right? That's a very... that's good, that's right. Yes, but even if you've got proof, it doesn't last. A miracle should be proved, right? Right. No, that's also an indication of their inadequacy.

Well, the thing about proof—even proof in some sense—if you think about it technically, proof can't work in relationship to the horizon of the future. Because if it's true that the future differs qualitatively from the past, which seems to be the case, that it's literally not predictable, then even if something did work in the past—that's the scandal of induction. Just because something did work in the past doesn't mean it's going to work in the future.

And so that means that, in some real sense, I think this is fundamentally true: in some real sense, you cannot confront the horizon of the potential of the future without faith. That is what you use to confront that because, otherwise, it's mere repetition of the past, in which case it's not really the future at all; it's not potential.

And so that must be associated too with that, the idea of the word that confronts potential at the beginning of time. That's truth serving love in some sense. But it's also going to be something like faith in the ability of potential to bring forth the order that is good because you never confronted otherwise. And so, so science—no, the natural sciences need a kind of degree of faith, a degree of credence.

When you're trying to sort of make predictions, scientists trying to make predictions and apply hypotheses, you're right; there is... well, the faith would be that that which corrects your prediction—because maybe you'd like your prediction to be true. But even more fundamentally, you have to believe that the transcendent object that corrects your presuppositions is good.

Yeah, and that on making contact with that serves the good and governed by regularities and patterns and life-giving orders. Well, otherwise, you'd think... you'd think more like Prometheus, right? You'd think, well, we don't want to make contact with the transcendent object as scientists because we'll be presumptuous; it'll just destroy us. Like, you could easily—and you know there's some reason to think that way, because God only knows what you're to discover scientifically.

But that isn't how scientists orient themselves. They think, well, we're following our internal logos, and we're making contact with the logos of the world. If we do that diligently and ethically, then the result will be good. That's a replication of the biblical pattern.

My secularists never have a view of freedom because cause and effect is always looking back, right? And you can't look forward to the scientific method. Yeah, well, and that... well, this—the thing is, in some sense, at that point, science devours itself. Because I don't think there's any credible scientific evidence that we're deterministic, and I think there's a fair bit of credible scientific evidence that not only are we not, but we can't be, and neither is the world.

It's more that they couldn't possibly be scientific evidence that we are free because the determinist just takes a step of faith and says that all of our actions can be explained. All our behavior can be explained in terms of physical causes and physical effects. But the person who believes in free agency just says that's not an exhaustive account of how we act.

Now, there's no scientific way to settle that. You might say, look, I believe that I'm free. I believe that I can lift up this cup, and I believe that more firmly than any skeptical argument you could bring. Okay, sometimes Penrose certainly believes that we cannot compute the horizon of the future deterministically.

And so even if we don't have free will, we have something that isn't deterministic because determinism per se doesn't work. But Penrose does believe in proofs; he comes up with the famous whole King Penrose Singularity theorem behind the Big Bang. So, UK, and he's a kind of Platonist as well. I think we talked about this before.

So if you're kind of... you can say that there are mathematical proofs, there are proofs, sure. But they couldn't be in this, as it were, in the physical order. So, you know, we'd be perfectly happy giving kids mathematics textbooks from the 1950s if they could still kind of understand them.

We'd be very worried if we were giving kids physics textbooks from the 1950s because science is moving along all the time. And so there's just not... you know, the skepticism is healthy in scientific inquiry. In fact, you can almost guarantee that the science is going to be very different in 2031—40 years' time.

And yet it's because it's acquired this kind of sacred status—scientific knowledge, a kind of—this is actually the source of all certainty. Well, science is actually the process, not the consequence, in some real sense, right?

And it sounds like a science denier. Well, certainly. Well, one of the things you learned, Thomas, too, is that it's very... you cannot teach people to be a scientist by... you cannot teach a person to be a scientist by teaching them scientific doctrines or scientific facts because people like to think of science as a collection of facts. But if you look at how science is practiced, it's actually primarily a system of apprenticeship.

So you go into a lab with a scientist who's a practitioner and a researcher, and you learn in an embodied sense how to conduct yourself as a researcher. And most of that... some of it's technical, some of it's administrative, but a huge part of it is ethical. And that's especially true on the statistical front because if you don't treat the revelation of your experiment 100% ethically, you won't discover anything that's real, and you warp your career in the scientific enterprise.

So fundamentally what you're apprenticing in is an ethic of a humble approach and responsibility. And that's the embodied training as a scientist. And no one says that really in a scientific paper because it's a given. But it's not an obvious given when you start to think about it philosophically.

This is also the thing that Larry was bringing up last night about teachers being taught teaching methods rather than having a philosophical basis from which to teach. And we see this a lot [applause]. Right where there's a lot of courses and programs and degrees and certificates that teach you writing, and you can study writing all the way through.

But then you have all the skills and craft of writing, with then, what are you going to write about? Because you've only been studying how to write. Right? And this is part of that... you and I, we talk about this a lot, about the dislocation between avatars of meaning and what they're supposed to be attached to. It's like there's this floating away, and it's the... it's sort of like the senseless rote work that's removed from the undergirding meaning in all these fields and the attempt to reduce to method.

Well, the ethic you talk about, the one of the maddest—maybe the only time my father got mad at me academically—was in early high school, and I was like debating, like, fudging some results. Exhausted at like two in the morning, and nothing was working in a science lab. And he was like... there’s no—like he was mad at me with the full fury of his Hippocratic Oath as a physician.

It was like you don't do that, right? You don't do that; that's not allowed as something that you can do, right? Well, that's... well, and I can't help but see that as a religious vow. It is, I will not falsify the data. And that's the data, if it's real data—there's a pattern; there's a pattern in that.

And what the data represents is the transcendent object. And that's a technical part of science because you're trying to falsify your hypothesis.