I’ve been thinking about writing a series about faith. I’ve hesitated to do so because I should do a bunch of study first and plan out the series. But, what the heck. I think I’ll just wade in, start writing, and see where this goes.

Of course, I wrote a book about faith, comparing the faith exhibited by people in the Bible to Christians throughout church history. The book has sold fairly well (according to comparative sales of all my books, which isn’t saying much). I published that in 2019, so obviously I’ve been thinking about faith for a while.

Even after it started to gel for me and I wrote the book, it came home to me again when I read a book of Bertram Russell’s writings. It was a book of Russell’s letters responding to people who had written to him. I picked up the book at a library sale out of town, and moved it to the top of my reading pile. I reviewed it here. I was about 1/3 through it when I thought it was possible Russell made reference to C.S. Lewis, since they were, to some extent, contemporaries, though on the opposite side of the belief in God issue.

Then I saw the book had an index, and, sure enough, Lewis’s name was in it.  I flipped to that page and read the letter. Someone had asked Russell about faith as discussed in some of Lewis’s writings. I didn’t keep the book, so I can’t go back and read Russell’s exact answer, but it was something to the effect he would rather put his trust in facts as determined by science rather than in faith based on myth. I tried to find that quote, or a similar quote by Russell, but I can’t, in my internet searching. But fortunately, I wrote a post about this here.

This got me thinking to the idea of trusting in science vs trusting in God. Science, for sure, is based on objective experimentation that is repeatable. But sometimes assumptions are necessary. Sometimes science starts out as theories that await hoped-for rigorous experimental data at a later point. Russell’s theory sounds good. You should be able to trust data based on rigorous experimentation as the highest and best data.

Except, I keep thinking back to freshman year chemistry (at college). Our professor looked like a 50-year-old-ish man. He said that his own chemistry professor, two-some-odd years before, said, “Forty percent of what I teach you will be proved wrong withing 25 years.” My professor was implying that some amount of the things he taught us would be proved wrong years hence.

I’ve never forgotten that. That also gives me pause whenever someone say, “Trust the science.” I want to respond, “You mean the imperfect science as we know it today, or the better science we’ll have in the future?”

But surely that’s not true of every branch of science. The things Isaac Newton learned in the 17th and 18th centuries have been proven again and again. We can certainly trust that, and many other areas of science.

But this post started out as about Bertram Russell. As I quoted him in my previous post:

I think that all religions consist at least in part of believing things for which there is no evidence and I think that in face of such beliefs loyalty to evidence should be substituted.

In other words, make all your decisions based on evidence, never on faith.

And I thought, how sad for Russell, to not have faith in something.

But, this post is too long. I’ll write another about faith on Friday.