IN A recent opinion piece in The New York Times, physicist Paul Davies asserts that it is a mistake to distinguish science from religion by describing the former as based on testable hypotheses while the latter is based on faith. “The problem with this neat separation,” he says, “is that science has its own faith-based belief system.”
Davies does not seem especially clear about what he means by this. He begins by describing scientific faith as “the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way”, but soon shifts to describing it as “belief in the existence of…
