How does modern science differ from faith? How do these compare in terms of teleological or cause-and-effect explanations?

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I’ll deal with science first, then faith, then we can examine the philosophical implications.

It’s interesting that the question wants an examination of modern science. Modernity, like many words, has a popular conception and a more precise academic definition. I’ll explore this tangent because it’s actually quite important to both science and faith.

In popular usage, ‘modern’ simply means, “relatively new.” Perhaps you think of cars, the Internet, anything at the zeitgeist of popular culture. But this conception utterly fails to be precise enough for academic inquiry, and, digging in, what most people think of when they hear ‘modern’ is more properly termed ‘postmodern’. Modern is a point in time, a range of years where the people that lived during that time contributed in a specific, coordinated way. There is modern science, and modern faith. Similarly, there is postmodern science, and postmodern faith.

As the modern period is considered to be from the Age of Reason/Enlightenment circa 17–1800s through to the end of WW2, modern science is quite old indeed. It’s the age of Copernicus, Gallileo, and Isaac Newton. It’s conveniently bookended with nuclear science and the development of the atomic bomb.

Why does WW2 seem so far off, not really in consideration when ‘modern’ science is discussed? This question is specifically what the concept of postmodernism deals with. The explosion of scientific, industrial, and communications tech that defines the era we live in. How the whole world just seems to move faster and faster with every passing year, and how quickly ideas and events pass from public memory. We’re no longer modern. We’re long past that, to the point where we need an entirely new set of ideas and frameworks to understand how everything works. Hence “postmodern.”

Okay, let’s consider faith. I’ll quote theologian Thomas C. Oden as a jumping off point. He considers modern to encompass the following emerging values:

"Moral relativism (which says that what is right is dictated by culture, social location, and situation)"
"Autonomous individualism (which assumes that moral authority comes essentially from within)"
"Narcissistic hedonism (which focuses on egocentric personal pleasure)"
"Reductive naturalism (which reduces what is reliably known to what one can see, hear, and empirically investigate)"

All of these values are reflective of a simple historical truth. Economic success and capitalist values provided a burgeoning middle class with the ability to contribute, inform, and, ultimately, form the crux and focus for, the modern period going forward. Of course they’re going to be hedonistic and individualistic. Before, society catered to the aristocratic class, it was only those with means who had what we now call citizenship in society. And it’s easy for aristocrats to pay lip service to moral absolutism and the primacy of the establishment when the establishment exists to cater to them!

Modern faith, thus, is the reactionary rear-guard action on the part of the declining state-within-a-state ecclesiastic authority, to preserve as much as possible, it’s relevance to modern society and therefore it’s clout and resources.

Postmodern faith, therefore, arrives at the moment the theological establishment is at its lowest, what those in the 12 step community call “rock bottom,” and chronicles its rise again. First in fits and starts, as fundamentalism took hold all over the world, and then finally in tired resignation as the faith community can no longer hide from their increasing irrelevance, and comes to the collective realization that it really is all about a person’s individual connection with the deity, and to “render unto Caesar.”

That all said, let’s finally contemplate the philosophical questions. What precisely distinguishes science from faith? What is teleology and cause and effect?

Specifically, these are concepts considered by the discipline of epistemology. Epistemology wants to understand “how do we know things.” What is knowledge?

The fundamentals of epistemology were set in place by the ancient Greeks, thousands of years before the modern period. That is how old this question is, and how old the answer is, and it hasn’t changed since. Knowledge comprises the Justified True Belief. Three components, each of them very important to the field. They all have very specific definitions, and they’re not what you think. A belief is anything a human can think. True means verifiable and accurate. Justification is how we can tell that the fact is true. Without all three components, it’s not knowledge.

Postmodern science builds on modern science, which in turn built on medieval science, which built on classical science, which started with the bedrock foundational theory of science.

Science is a way to justify, in the epistemological sense, that a true belief is in fact knowledge. Read that again, it’s very important. If you follow the rules of science, then true beliefs so justified are indeed knowledge and can be considered to be true so far as the justification allows.

When most Westerners consider science, that is, the popular conception of facts that are indisputably true, perhaps in the face of red-faced pastors who insist that the world was really made in 6000 years with a snake convincing a woman to tempt a man into original sin, they’re really reacting, in the same way modern clerics reacted to modernity and it’s hedonisms, to the postmodern phenomenon of fundamentalism.

They’re not using the fundamental definition of science, which is that, if you set up a situation in which repeatable results are obtainable concerning a particular phenomenon, those results will continue to be repeatable. The senses are a reliable way of observing and controlling the world. Mistaken Westerners say science when they mean knowledge without realizing that science can only produce knowledge when the experiment is empirical, and then only to the extent of the observed phenomena.

Similarly, faith produces knowledge, through a different kind of justification. While the scientific method abhors teleology as a means for justification, theology considers circularity an aspect of divinity. An example might be: faith drives belief, and belief drives faith. This doesn’t make sense from a scientific view, but remember we’re not dealing with empirical observations here, we’re dealing in the world of the mind. The remit of theology is far greater than that of the physical world.

Theological knowledge is produced through a process by which individual beliefs, which may or may not be true, get produced in parallel over thousands of years, and collect together and evolve. Theologians observe these beliefs throughout history and come to conclusions about how the world of faith operates. A teleology, when causes and effects merge into each other, is a pointer towards a divine cause. Things have always been this way, so therefore there’s something right about it, God must have ordained it.

Using God as a justification that turns a true belief into knowledge may not sound intuitive to the postmodern mind, and it’s not just you. The ancient Greeks devised philosophy, which means love of wisdom, to investigate this very question. However interesting they found it back in the ancient Near East, it would take until the Age of Reason, some two thousand years later, before humanity could work out, over hundreds of years, how to organize a society around the principles of humanism, capitalism, and reason over faith.

Why did it take so long? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but slavery, and later, feudalism, was a big reason. You don’t need science to build washing machines and electric ovens if you can just force people to do your drudge work. Philosophy, epistemology, and science were side shows, intellectual curiosities, until the modern period when a middle class suddenly emerged, looking to rise up and affect the world.

Now just rewind back to the beginning of the essay to find out how it ends.