P.J. O'Rourke "On God"

Is faith compatible with science? Does science take faith into account? Should scientists keep religious faith in mind while they do their scientific theorizing, their scientific experimenting, their scientific … But here I begin to lose faith in my ability to ask the question. I have some idea what God does. I have no idea what scientists do. My entire store of information about scientific activity comes from what I’ve seen in the movies. There, scientists used to be represented as men in white coats busy with incomprehensible jumbles of glass tubing connected to foaming beakers and bubbling test tubes. Now, scientists are represented as men (and women) in white coats busy with incomprehensible jumbles of numbers on computer screens. All I can really tell you about science is that its set designers aren’t as good as they used to be.

I look up science in Webster’s—“possession of knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding”—and find myself possessed of no greater knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding.

Let me resort to the usual practice of the ignoramus and give up on philosophical inquiry and just proclaim an opinion: Science requires more faith than God.

I came to that conclusion in my high school physics class (a course that was required, by the way). The physics teacher had just explained how electricity makes a refrigerator work. I raised my hand.

Me: “Electricity is energy.”

Physics teacher: “Yes.”

Me: “Energy is heat.”

Physics teacher: “Yes, heat is one way to measure energy.”

Me: “A refrigerator is cold.”

I graduated only because the physics teacher suddenly remembered that he was also the summer school physics teacher and that if I flunked I’d be back in his class in July.

Faith depends upon belief in things that cannot be proved, and I can prove that more people flunk physics than flunk Sunday School.

“But science can be proved,” a scientist would say. “The whole point of science is experimental proof.” Yet we non-scientists have to take that experimental proof on faith because we don’t know what the scientists are talking about. This makes science a matter of faith in men while religion, of course, is a matter of faith in God, and if you’ve got to choose …

Personally, I don’t think you do. Science and religion both assert the same thing: that the universe operates according to rules and that those rules can be discerned. Albeit this does make it easier to believe in God than, for instance, organic chemistry. Just the fact of rules implies a rule maker while just the fact of mixing nitro with glycerin and causing an explosion does not imply a Ph.D.

I’m also given to understand that the rules of science begin to bend and even break at the extremes of the universe’s scale. Down where everything is subatomic-sized, things tend to be a bit random with mesons, leptons, quarks, brilligs, slithy toves, etc., subjected to Strong Force, Weak Force, Force of Habit, and so on. Meanwhile, in the farthest reaches of outer space, matter, antimatter, dark matter, and whatsamatter are tripping over string theory and falling into black holes. God is not like that. He’s famously there in the details, and He is the big picture.

In one way, however, faith in science does come easier than faith in God—if fear is any gauge of how real we believe a thing is. To judge by human behavior, people are not trembling before the Almighty much. But many of those same people are scared silly by science. They are frightened by a climate stuck in the microwave of technological advances, frightened by genetic modifications that may—who knows?—cross cabbages with kings and produce a Prince Charles, and naturally they are frightened by the clouds of mushrooms being grown in the science cellars of Iran and North Korea.

One sympathizes with science’s faithful. The apocalyptic power of God has existed forever, and He’s been restrained about using it, despite provocation. The apocalyptic power of science has existed only since 1945, and the A-bomb has been tried twice already.

“Fear of God” is most often manifested today in the public’s alarm that religious zealots will try to destroy the world. Providentially, God has made the zealots as incapable of using reason, logic, and the other tools of science as I am. Religious zealots can’t blow up the world the way scientists can. The zealots must secure the faith of the scientists. But the scientists don’t know what the zealots are talking about. Is faith compatible with science? Not completely—and that’s a blessing.

http://www.searchmagazine.org/On%20God/orourke-on-god.html

Science=what we currently think is true.
Faith= what used to be true but is not longer true yet people have such a strong emotional/psychological/insitututional/financial attachment to it that they don't want to quit believing it. Something that's false but not yet abandoned.

Religion=can use either science or faith. Which it uses fluctuates with time/place/individuals.

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