For millennia people have understood the world through the lens of faith, the firm belief in teachings handed down by a select few anointed individuals, or prophets, with a special connection to God. Biblically, there appears to only be a few people in each millennium considered worthy enough to be God’s mouthpiece; today many Catholics believe the Pope fulfils a comparable role, and other religions have similar characters who are able to delineate truths revealed from on high. On the surface, the sphere of science seems a million miles from the domain of faith, perhaps almost its opposite; after all science operates on principles of falsification and scepticism, not trust. However, from the position of a lay-audience science and religion have much more in common than you might expect.

Someone unfamiliar with the scientific theory on a given subject is expected to accept scientific truths on the authority of a few esteemed scientists whom, as far as they are concerned, are individuals with special insight. This is much the same way in which people revered the prophets of old. An obvious objection to this comparison would be that, according to the principles of the scientific method, people who doubt a scientific principle or observation are invited to disprove it, therefore the longer a certain idea lasts the more we can be confident in its truth value; whereas in religion such open enquiry has historically been discouraged, thus faith belongs in religion and should have no place in scientific discourse. I agree with this basic distinction and of course in essence science and religion are completely different entities, but to an uninitiated individual the overall experience is much the same. Can we reasonably expect a lay person to have the necessary resources, or even the requisite understanding of theory and experimental protocol to go about falsifying or systematically disproving modern scientific theories? How would any of us go about deciding whether the Hadron-collider data that glimpsed the Higgs Boson is accurate or not? We are simply expected to believe the scientists involved in such projects have the ability to know these things and trust that they do. Obviously this ability isn’t divine, but that is irrelevant to those of us who aren’t educated particle physicists, because it is unlikely we will ever have the requisite understanding to check, and know, for ourselves that what they say is true. Therefore we must accept what they say on authority, not on evidence. This is a species of faith.

Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan formulated the idea of ‘Le sujet supposé savoir’, or the ‘subject who is supposed to know’. In Psychoanalysis this represents the faith the person being analysed places in the knowledge of the analyst, which Lacan considered more important than the knowledge itself. The psychoanalyst is the one ‘who is supposed to know’, and therefore the patient puts far more stock in what they say because of this supposition. Scientists fulfil this role for society, we think they are the ones who are ‘supposed to know’, and therefore we collectively heed their advice, when once we invested in the advice of prophets. Now it is scientists, not prophets, who commune with governments, inform policy, and receive extensive tax-payer subsidy; they are the Levites of a new age.

For the scientific illiterate, Science’s usurpation of Religion is like the invasion of a foreign king as seen by a peasant, it’s a purely nominal change and life continues much the same. The king himself may be the complete opposite of his predecessor in nature, but the peasant will never be close enough to either king to understand this difference, what is asked of him does not change. Science requires no less faith and fealty than religion, it may operate on completely dissimilar principles, but to the lay audience (incidentally: ‘lay’ is originally a religious word meaning ‘non-ordained’ finding new meaning in scientific society) they are equally beyond the horizon of their understanding. Arthur C. Clarke wrote ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’, in this case the quote should read ‘For most, any sufficiently advanced method of discerning truth is indistinguishable from special revelation’ (Although that’s much less poetic).