Defense of Truth

Please excuse me the incredible hubris of deigning to disagree with René Descartes: the heart of science is NOT doubt, it is doubt's opposite--faith. The scientific method describes the process of learning any empirical truth as beginning with enough curiosity to ask a question, then to doubt your own intuitions or the established "truth" enough to force yourself to experiment and prove whether your hypothesis is correct or incorrect. It's the self-doubt, or doubt of intuition, or even previous explanations (doubt of which leads to curiosity) that is meant when scientists talk about scientific skepticism. The problem, for me, is that I think it is falsely labeling the desire to find out for certain if something is true as a doubt, rather than as a form of faith. Is faith not the evidence of things not seen, the substance of things hoped for? If you hope to know something, and invest thought and effort into designing an experiment that would reveal your hypothesis as e...

Have you ever played 20 questions with one of those "stories with holes"? I remember as a kid I had a teacher pull some of us aside to challenge us with these while the rest of the class worked on something we had already mastered. The idea was to tell a story with seemingly neutral facts and with a key part of the narrative missing so that by asking 20 or less yes/no questions you could deduce the key to the narrative. Almost always, the seemingly neutral description contained a critical clue that triggered the game-players' assumptions in a way that led them down a false path, and hindered their deductive process until they could hone in on the assumption, question it, and break out of the consequences of the assumption. Maybe a few concrete examples, if I can remember some: A man is driving in his car and is killed by a gunshot, but there's no hole in his vehicle. Most people start asking about whether the windows were open (nope, all closed up), and about passenge...

It's a travesty that even serious thinkers refuse to engage debates on faith. For many who have faith in logic, reason, and scientific principles (you'll excuse the circular definition for the purposes of illustration here, I hope), faith has come to mean whatever is beyond their purview—something that's simply un-provable by empirical, objective means. But if faith truly can be defined as a motivating belief in a truth of which the evidence is not readily discernable, then the truths behind it can be verified, are acquired by a "scientific" process of hypothesis testing and confirmation of truth or rejection of falsehood, and it is therefore missing an opportunity to grow in knowledge and intelligence to simply bracket certain areas of inquiry as unfit for experiment, debate, or even serious thought. Defining faith as a principle of action based on truth implies that it's more like what most would call knowledge than the unsubstantiated hokey claims of irrati...