Faith and Science

In response to various comments, it becomes necessary to examine the relationship between faith and science. In short, there is no relationship because faith and science are mutually exclusive. As a prerequisite for something to be considered a scientific discipline, it must not include any leaps of faith. This is not to say that everything must be proven for a topic to be discussed scientifically, but rather that unknowns be considered uncertain. Speculation can be made about these unknowns in the form of a hypothesis. Hypothesis are similar to faith in that they make statements about an unknown, but there is one key difference. This key difference is that any hypothesis must include a counter-hypothesis that can be proven. Some abbreviations used to denote the counter-hypothesis and that hypothesis are H0 and H1 respectively. So, a hypothesis about the effect of a vaccination for HIV might look like this.
H0: the HIV virus continues to exist in the host.
H1: the HIV virus has been either reduced or eradicated as a direct result of the vaccination.

The H0 or the counter-hypothesis can easily be proven true by a simple blood test. If the H0 is proven true the hypothesis will be discarded and the unknown will remain an unknown. In the event that the experimentor cannot prove the H0 true then statistical tests will determine the likelyhood that the H1 is true. Keep in mind that it is impossible to prove the H1 true since the result could always be due to an extraneous factor or simple experimental error. Thus, statistical tests will be run to determine the chance that the result was due to the treatment. Repeating the experiment and achieving the same results will increase the chance that the result is due to the treatment and only once the chance of the result being due to chance is sufficiently low, will the hypothesis be regarded in the scientific community as true. Faith works in exactly the opposite way of a hypothesis. In a faith based argument the H1 can be proven and the H0 cannot. For example, the most common faith based argument goes as follows:
H0: God does not exist.
H1: God does exist.

It is philisophically impossible to prove that something does not exist, but fairly easy to prove that something does. In this example God could simply appear and thus prove its existance. So, in summary, a hypothesis attempts to disprove a claim while in a Faith based argument it is impossible to disprove a claim. Thus, I use the above argument to defend a point I made in a previous post that it lies in the hands of believers to prove the existance of God as it is impossible for scientists to disprove it.

Rik pointed out that superstitions are another form of faith which brings me to my next point: Faith is in the eye of the beholder. A religious person has faith in the existance of god, while a baseball player has faith that not changing his socks will increase his batting percentage, and a child has faith in the existance of Santa Clause. One could even argue that the existance of Santa Clause is as real to a young child as the existance of God is to a believer. I would like to use this to defend my previous analogy which compared God to Santa.

In conclusion, I do not intend to shoot down all of your comments, but rather to encourage you to post counter-arguments to my counter-argument. Furthermore, I do not intend to offend anybody of faith and I truly believe that many good things can come from faith. It must simply be recognized that faith and science are mutually exclusive.