FAITH, BELIEF AND COMMITMENT

Religious belief is traditionally expressed, especially in Christianity, in the form of confessional language. Comparisons of religion with science tend to rely on parsing confessional language into propositions akin to scientific theory. This leads to the mistaken conclusion that religious faith is equivalent to tenaciously holding onto scientific theories even in the face of contrary evidence. While there may be some superficial similarity between confessional statements and theories, the analogy is fundamentally misleading for several reasons. First, confessional language starts with an existential commitment, not a theoretical one. Second, if one can talk about theological theories they are about confessional expressions and how to interpret them. That is, they are treated more like data than theories in science, although even this analogy is not very close. Third, confessional statements serve to delineate the boundaries of a particular faith community, a process that is just as important in the case of science as it is for religious communities. Ordinarily there are no confessional statements in science, not because science is open to change and religion is not, but because of contingent differences in history and practice. However, there are circumstances when commitments in science are expressed in language that is not altogether different from religious confession.