this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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Faith is "complete trust or confidence in someone or something". Gravity is essentially a statement of a physical phenomena where things with mass are attracted to other things with mass. You can have faith in that physical phenomena, but that is no more useful than having faith that the number 1 exists. It just is, whether or not you believe it.
Then there's Newton's theory of gravity, which exists as a mathematical model of gravity, where the force of attraction of gravity can be modeled as a proportion of their masses. That works great in certain cases but break down elsewhere, and not until Einstein's General Relativity did we have a model that more accurately explained other things about gravity such that time itself behaves different around different sized masses, and also the speed of those masses has an effect on the way that they experience time, and changes in gravity take time to be communicated with other things that can experience that gravity: they are not instantaneous. Time matters. None of that is covered in Newton's model.
So, if you have faith in gravity, what do you have faith in? Newton's model, or Einstein's Model? If you have 'faith' then you have completely trust or confidence, by the definition of faith. So if you have complete confidence in Newton's model, you're wrong. Newton's model doesn't accurately explain many of the gravitation things we can observe. So say you want to change your mind and don't want to 'believe' in Newton's model anymore. You're a follower of Einstein now, because his model is better. Well that means you didn't actually have 'faith' in Newton's model in the first place. You didn't have complete trust or confidence.
When people talk about faith having no place in science, this is what they mean. Believing one thing to be true does not matter. All that matters is which model fits the evidence the best. And which model best fits will change over time. So a good scientist should change as well.
I have faith that there is an attractive force tied to mass
Great. Again though, that's about as useful as saying you have faith that the number 1 exists.
The question of whether it's the mass that causes the force, or the force that causes the mass, or even if is a force in the first place are all open questions. It can be modeled as a force tied to the proportionality of the masses involved and their distance separated. It can also be modeled as a warping of spacetime, where objects moving closer to each other over time is just the result of of objects moving in straight lines through a curved spacetime. Whether it's a force or not is a question of if it can be modeled to have a force carrying particle as part of the standard model, just like we have the photon for the electromagnetic force, the W and Z bosons for the weak force, and the gluon for the strong force.
If you have faith in any of those interpretations, it means you're ignoring observational evidence supporting any other interpretations, which is just bad science.
Then my faith will change
Then that's not faith.
Its okay. You can say that.
You can also say "well my definition of faith isn't the same as what everyone else's definition of faith is, and my definition of faith allows me not be faithful to my previous faith and change my faith beliefs whenever I choose". That's fine. Just don't expect everyone else to have the same definition.
People change faith all the time. In fact if you type into google "does faith change" the first several things I get are papers discussing that faith does change and why, including the introduction of new information on a subject. So you are wrong.