Coyne: No Faith In Science

I disagree with Jerry Coyne about this.

I'm not sure that faith in science is on par with the kind of faith that most people seem to have in mind when they assert that science and religion are on par--they seem to be talking about "blind" faith. (Of course, many religious folks treat faith as if it were magical--as if it conferred all the advantages of knowledge onto their preferred beliefs, without requiring any of that pesky proof...)

For some time now I've been pretty interested in Richard Smyth's interpretation of Peirce with respect to the justification of the logic of science. In short, that does involve a kind of appeal to Kantian rational faith. The argument begins with the recognition that we (currently) have no non-circular justification of the types of inference requried by science (and, since circular justifications don't work, we can just leave out the 'non-circular' in that sentence; it's superfluous...) Most notoriously, we don't  know how to justify induction. Coyne makes an appeal to Dawkins--always a mistake in these matters--who writes:

There is a very, very important difference between feeling strongly, even passionately, about something because we have thought about and examined the evidence for it on the one hand, and feeling strongly about something because it has been internally revealed to us, or internally revealed to somebody else in history and subsequently hallowed by tradition. There's all the difference in the world between a belief that one is prepared to defend by quoting evidence and logic and a belief that is supported by nothing more than tradition, authority, or revelation.

But this won't work. The problem at the end of this trail is that we don't know how to justify the principles we use in our inferences. Sure, we can look at the evidence, but if we don't know how to justify induction--for example, we don't know how to show that it's more rational to reason inductively than to reason counter-inductively (though you don't have to make the argument that way)--then we seem to have no rational grounds for doing what we do with that evidence instead of something else.

Coyne writes:

What about faith in reason? Wrong again. Reason—the habit of being critical, logical, and of learning from experience—is not an a priori assumption but a tool that’s been shown to work. It’s what produced antibiotics, computers, and our ability to sequence DNA. We don’t have faith in reason; we use reason because, unlike revelation, it produces results and understanding. Even discussing why we should use reason employs reason!

 This, however, doesn't seem to work either, for well-known reasons. Think again about induction. The claim that we are justified in reasoning inductively because it works is patently circular, even on the best reconstruction of it--all we know is that induction has worked well so far. To conclude that we should reason inductively tomorrow is (apparently) to reason inductively: induction has worked in the past, so it will work in the future. Circularity, again. (Note: I don't think the past-to-future characterization of induction is right...I'm just employing it here for brevity.)

Coyne also writes:

Finally, isn’t science at least based on the faith that it’s good to know the truth? Hardly. The notion that knowledge is better than ignorance is not a quasi-religious faith, but a preference: We prefer to know what’s right because what’s wrong usually doesn’t work. We don’t describe plumbing or auto mechanics as resting on the faith that it’s better to have your pipes and cars in working order, yet people in these professions also depend on finding truth.

But a mere preference does not constitute a justification. So, though it's right to say that this appeal can't prove the conclusion that science is based on faith, that's a hollow victory. This response says that science is based on something exactly as irrational as faith. But, of course, Coyne tries to slip in proof to bolster preference at the end of the argument: we just prefer it...but we prefer it because it works...circularity and other nastiness threaten again...

Honestly, I don't see why glib, unsound defenses of science are much better than glib, disingenuous attacks on science.