The God of the Overlap

I have a great Statistics teacher. He is well educated, and open to many ideas. I walked with him after class and had a small, but very good discussion about science and faith, and the overlap and differences between the two. He is a self-proclaimed "non-religious" man, and beleive it or not he was very accepting of my views, and when we departed with a hand shake i did not explode.

This conversation did get me thiking about things. Just to begin, non of these are the thoughts of my professor, these are mine alone. We were discussing the basics of science, the idea that in any experiment you test the null hypothesis. That is if you think something (like reading more) affects something else (less anxiety levels) you do not test that idea. Instead you test that there is no relation (or null relation). This makes the whole conversation about faith very different. Scientifically for one to prove that god does exist then one must disprove that god does not exist. This could work the other way around too, but the fact remains that there is no way to do that. god is something outside science, I'm not saying that there can't be things in science that may point to something bigger, but inherently this is a philosophical question not a scientific one.

What does not work is the God of the Gaps idea. Science can't be certain, so it works off of what is highly unlikely to be. If something is deemed highely unlikely to be true then science works as if it is not true, until it is shown wrong. Like minott has pointed out, a large game of sudoku. So if god is a philosophical question, then there shouldn't be a God of the Gaps idea. This is putting in the philosophy where it should be science.

But the real debate comes where there is an overlap. Science has its own form of faith( I will call it trust for distiniction's sake). The esssence of science trusts, many things: the other scienctist are telling the truth, that facts will be checked, that what is highly unlikely is truely falst. They are more like assumptions. I'm not science is untrue, do not think that, but there is a trust inherent in it. This can then bridge the gap to faith(in the philosophical sense) as we try to think either back in time, or in universal workings. The string theory for example is appealing, because if you but your trust in it, ther appears these constants that make mathmatical formulas work. This is incredably appealing, and beautiful in the full sense of the word. The things is there is an idea of another demension that leads to these beautiful working of numbers. The presence of this demension is what the trust of the string theory is in. That demension can not be proven or disproven(at least as of yet).

So, I guess my point is (after a long winded thought, sorry you had to read this). Is that in the essence of faith and science there is a disconnect, they are different. One can not come at questions of faith in the same manner as science. But there there is this larger sense of science that has a trust(faith) built in that gives an overlap. If anyone says faith is illogical, and that they beleive in science, then they don't understand what they are saying. There is a faith in science, and this overlap cause speculative dispute (and this blog).