A Jewish Theologian Speaks About the Role of Faith in Science
Science is as much built upon faith as is religion, and can dispense with it as little. Before science can proceed to investigate a single question, it must perform a number of pure acts of faith. All scientific enquiry implies a belief that the world of objects is amenable to rational interpretation. Acceptance of the trustworthiness of human reason and the senses…is another example of the part faith plays in science. For unless reason and the senses can be trusted, knowledge of the external world is impossible. A particular example in science of a deeper faith is the acceptance of the law of the uniformity of Nature. This law expresses the idea that the universe is an orderly whole, a rational system, with nothing freakish or chaotic in its composition. In accordance with this law we must conceive that the laws governing the little region of space and time open to us are directly related tot he structural law of events in vastly remote spaces and distant time. Without this conviction science would have been impossible, except in the sense of establishing entirely arbitrary connections, which are not warranted by anything intrinsic in the nature of things. But this law of uniformity of Nature, which is the first article of the scientific creed, has never been proved. This is admitted even by so thoroughgoing a scientist as T. H. Huxley, who declares in effect that faith, if only in the universality of order, is an essential condition for the study of Nature and the investigation of phenomena . Here we have a declaration by one of the high priests of Science, that science depends on faith no less than Religion. Professor Whitehead, too, speaks of 'faith in reason' as the trust 'that the ultimate nature of things lies together in a harmony which excludes mere arbitrariness.' 'This faith,' he continues, 'cannot be justified by any inductive generalisation.' Yet science goes forward with its tasks, untroubled by the reflection that its faith in the uniformity of Nature is incapable of demonstration. It is satisfied with the knowledge that this faith has provided science with the explanation of the things disclosed to us in a way which no other theory could have done; that it has made progress possible; and that the more we look for it the more we shall find.

Rabbi Isidore Epstein (Principal of Jews' College, London). The Faith of Judaism. London: The Soncino Press, 1955, pp. 9-10.