In light of the 'new atheism' and its heavy emphasis on science, it is often asserted by believers that science does not have all the answers, and Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Victor Stenger, and others are wrong in supposing that it does. However, no one is actually claiming that science has all the answers. Religious opponents and other critics distort the arguments of atheists in order to endorse their flawed assumption that atheists have faith in science, portraying us as hypocritical for disparaging religious faith. There are perfectly good reasons to be atheist that have nothing to do with science, but because our modern age is so focused on technology, debates on religion and God frequently revolve around science. It is not only the atheist bringing this about, but the theist too, as creationism's presence plainly demonstrates.

Science does not have all the answers, nor does it need to, and with the apologist's objection realized as a moot one, a much more interesting question can be raised. If science does not have all the answers, does anything else have them?

I. One-Stop Knowledge

Fundamentalist Christians will jump to say that the bible is the only source with all the answers, though it has yet to provide us with a cure for cancer. Some believers will protest that this is not what they mean by 'answers', that these are a different type of answers they're referring to, but this is special pleading. If they do not mean literally all the answers, and instead claim something like all the metaphysical answers are found in the bible, then they must clarify this. Holding science at fault for not answering metaphysical questions while exempting your own preferred source from answering physical questions is special pleading and hypocrisy, because neither one really answers all questions.

No single source truly has all the answers, not even all the metaphysical answers. What happens to children too young to understand salvation or to make a decision about it? Does God have free will? If God is all-knowing and perfectly good, why did he create Satan at all, if he knew Satan would become the very origin of evil? Christians may speculate over these metaphysical questions, but the bible has no answers for them. Similar questions may be posed for Islam, Judaism, Mormonism, and any other religion, because none of them reveal every little detail about every aspect of what they believe, as doing so would defeat the purpose of faith, not to mention the impossible magnitude of something that comprehensive.

Religion does not have all the answers, and faith itself is an exercise of ignoring the questions, not seeking out answers. One-stop sources of knowledge probably do not exist, because of the sheer amount of different subjects of knowledge in our universe. Some may occasionally overlap, but just as you won't find the Pythagorean theorem in a Language Arts textbook, some questions will only have suitable answers in their relevant fields. This is also true for philosophy, psychology, astrology, and any other field of study. No one group or discipline literally has all the answers, nor do they even have all the answers within their own field. This is what keeps each discipline alive and thriving: the mystique of unanswered questions.

However, this is not to say that all approaches are equally valid, because some are certainly more reliable in acquiring knowledge than others. Instead of asking who, or what, has all the answers, the better question to ask would be, 'what is the best way of finding the answers?'

II. The Failure of Faith

Epistemology is the study of knowledge, specifically the nature and scope of it, as well as how it is acquired. There are many theories on the gathering of knowledge, such as empiricism, rationalism, and constructivism, and although each of them have their flaws - for there is no foolproof epistemology - some may be said to achieve their goal better than the others do. I will not get into many of these theories here, because the two most relevant to this article are the scientific method and faith. Is there reason to value one over the other?

First of all, one might rightly object to faith being considered the acquisition of knowledge. The idea of faith is more about believing in spite of knowledge, not believing based on knowledge, and this can be seen in passages like 2 Corinthians 5:7, where Paul instructs his followers, "we live by faith, not by sight." Sight is a way of acquiring knowledge, and this is key in the distinction Paul is intending to make, that it is virtuous to trust in God even when knowledge tells you that trusting in invisible beings is perhaps not so sensible. Elsewhere, faith is explained as "confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see" (Hebrews 11:1). Being confident in hope and sure of what you don't see is the polar opposite of knowledge, more accurately called defiance of knowledge.

While this may seem to put faith out of the realm of epistemology, many believers claim that the knowledge given from faith is a different kind from that given by other 'Earthly' methods. Often times this is summed up by the statement that faith is about who you know, not what you know. Many Christians will argue that faith produces knowledge, because knowing who Jesus is also helps them to know what their purpose in life is, among other details. It is worth asking, though, what reason believers have to think that this esoteric knowledge they gain can actually be called knowledge. Purpose, salvation, morality, and other concepts which have been proposed as knowledge that can result from faith are in heavy debate, often circular in the context of religion (I know how to be saved because I know the savior), and show little evidence of being anything other than opinions or preferences.

A theory on knowledge acquisition that does not sufficiently distinguish knowledge from opinion or preference is a worthless theory. Faith simply attaches labels and considers the job done. We will call knowledge anything that accords with the bible, and anything that does not will be opinion. This careless approach is part of why faith does not generate any demonstrable or useful knowledge. Devout believers have not been handed down the secrets of the universe on account of their faith. In numerous studies, prayer has turned up nothing effective in medical knowledge [1] or any other sort of knowledge. Additionally, no religion has an answer for the very same claims made by other religions. If a Christian claims to have received knowledge from his faith telling him that Islam is wrong, and a Muslim claims to have received knowledge from his faith telling him that Christianity is wrong, neither believer will have any basis for rejecting the other's claim aside from an admission that boils down to, 'I just believe differently.'

Faith is no source of knowledge, despite the assertions of the faithful. The best they can offer are nebulous and easily disputable opinions dressed up as facts. Some theists will find no problem in accepting that faith yields no knowledge, but one has to wonder what the value of faith is then. If we learn nothing from it, then what is the point? To be saved? Salvation is an article of faith itself, since one must assume there is something they must be saved from (the nebulous and easily disputed concept of sin). Faith for its own sake is all that remains, and this can hardly be called a justification, especially with the destructive history behind such blind devotion.

III. The Scientific Method

Atheists often carry on about science because it operates by one of the best available methods for collecting information and separating out fact from fiction, or knowledge from opinion. The steps of the scientific method include an observation, hypothesis, prediction, experimentation, and conclusion, followed by a process of peer review. What makes this method so important is that it provides for independent verification. When anyone is able to replicate an experiment or study, it will add to either the strength of the hypothesis or the case against it. This makes for a much more objective approach, transcending the opinions or potential mistakes of one individual and weighing ideas against other established knowledge.

Falsifiability is another important aspect of the scientific method. An hypothesis must be able to be disproven, or falsified, because there are some claims that are intentionally constructed to resist evaluation. Imagine that every time you kick a football and are about to score, your opponent moves the goal post so that your kick misses. There is a similar way of cheating in how a person formulates a claim. Carl Sagan used the example of an invisible, incorporeal, and floating dragon that breathes heatless fire to make his point about the value of falsifiability [2]. The inability to disprove a claim may amount to nothing more than clever wording, the equivalent of moving the goal post, and it does not make the existence of a creature like Sagan's dragon any more likely. If a claim is falsifiable, not only will it avoid this rhetorical trap, but every discovery that supports it - when it could have just as easily debunked it - adds to the strength of the claim.

The scientific approach has a much smaller margin of error than the faith approach, because of the numerous means to evaluate ideas, which help to streamline the process of acquiring genuine knowledge. At most, faith evaluates what it receives according to a religious text, a religious authority figure, or personal intuition. None of these can be shown to separate fact from fiction though, especially not to the same degree as the scientific method. There is no independent verification or falsifiability in matters of faith. Any person may go out and test the theory of gravity at any time they wish by merely tossing an object in the air, but one cannot test the resurrection simply by reading scripture, talking to a pastor, or thinking about it.

When it comes to reliability of acquiring knowledge, science has the advantage over faith. Historically, progress has not come from surrendering to faith, and many of the discoveries of science actually supplanted religious explanations, but as of yet, no religious explanation has supplanted even a single scientific one. When faith failed to send rain on our crops, science gave us irrigation. When faith could not heal us of our ailments, science provided us with medicine. When faith was unable to prevent starvation, science 'multiplied the loaves' with genetically enhanced foods more abundant in growth and resistant to disease. Science may not have all the answers, but it most certainly does have a lot of them, which is more than can be said for faith, which, over thousands of years, has turned up... what, exactly? Are we any closer to understanding God or solving the problem of evil? Emphatically - no.

1. Carey, B. (2006) Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer. The New York Times. Retrieved Jan. 18, 2011.
2. Sagan, C. (1996) The Demon-Haunted World. p.171. Ballantine Books: New York.