experts and laity: what the social epistemology of science and religion reveals about their relationship

The rationality of theistic belief is often thought to be called into question in virtue of the way in which the epistemic standards of faith traditions appear to run against the grain of the epistemic standards of the scientific community. since these latter standards have proven so powerful in furnishing an understanding of the nature of reality, this suggests that they are the correct ones to espouse and that the epistemic standards of religions ought to be dispensed with. another way of putting the point would be to say that the success of science has vindicated the rationality of scientific reasoning, and since these are incompatible with the epistemic standards of religion, this means that theistic belief is irrational. i refer to this as the science-religion epistemic conflict model (endorsed by kitcher (2004), dawes (2016), stenger (2012), coyne (2015) et al.). in this essay, i show that the standard formulations of the model possess a devastating flaw; this consists in a tacit asymmetry among the epistemic standards of experts and laity.on the one hand, central to the religious enterprise is the doxastic habit or belief-forming tendency of faith. (it is important to acknowledge, here, that this construes the conflict in a somewhat parochial fashion, given that the present conception of faith is largely found in the major monotheistic traditions: christianity, islam and judaism. nevertheless, given that such traditions are typically the target of treatments concerning science and religion, this is no serious problem.) and though the religious deem such practices epistemically permissible, it is pointed out by proponents of the conflict that this “presupposes that it is valid…to adopt views that are not supported by the evidence.” (kitcher (2004), 277) while this may, at first blush, seem a rather uncharitable understanding of faith, we see as prominent a champion of faith as thomas aquinas maintaining that, “faith is a habit of our mind, by which eternal life begins in us, and which makes our understanding assent to things which are not evident.” (de veritate 14.2) consequently, it appears as though kitcher and others are correct in conceiving of faith as involving some sort of belief in religious doctrines on the say-so of an authority in the absence of corroborating independent evidence.scientific standards of inquiry, on the other hand, are held up as putatively proscribing any sort of doxastic practice approximating faith. conceptions of what exactly is epistemically proprietous about scientific inquiry differ. some claim that it is the fact that science is based on evidence, (oreskes (2019)) others claim that it is the falsifiability of scientific theories, (coyne (2015)) and still others the winnowing collaborative element part and parcel of the scientific community.