We live in a largely secular world, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have faith in something. As atheists, and, more broadly as people living in 2025, we have faith in science.
But why? What does it mean to have faith in science?
What is old faith?
For most of human existence, we’ve had faith in religious constructs: gods, demons, spirits, and so on. In order to explain the things which we couldn’t otherwise explain—what happens after a person dies, why does it rain, where did the Earth come from—we turned to religion.
People all across the world did it. Ancient humans in Africa, Europe, the Americas, Asia, and practically everywhere else had faith in religious constructs.
The specifics of what they believed differed. But their faith satisfied the same basic need: as humans, we need to believe that something can explain the complicated universe around us. We need to believe that there are answers.
We used to believe that those answers came from more powerful beings or forces. But what about now? What has happened to our need to believe?
What is new faith?
We live in a much less religious world nowadays, particularly in liberal America. In fact, almost 10% of all Americans consider themselves non-religious. With the (comparatively new) separation of church and state and increased religious freedom, the world has been growing more secular for a long time.
I myself am somewhere between an atheist and an agnostic. Young liberal people like me are much more likely to reject religion.
We’d like to believe that we’re a more evolved human who no longer has the need to believe, but that’s far from the truth. Evolution doesn’t work fast enough to have eradicated that need: it took 6-8 million years to evolve from apes to humans, and since then we’ve only existed for roughly 300,000 years.
Thanks to science, the average person understands more about existence than they did 300,000 years ago. Humanity can explain a lot more than ever before.
But the average person isn’t a scientist and so doesn’t understand most things that science has figured out about the world.
For example, if you ask the average person whether or not they are made up of cells, they’ll probably answer yes. But if you ask them how they know that, they won’t dive into a complicated experiment and prove it. Instead, they will probably say something like, “It’s just science.”
The refrain “It’s just science” functions effectively the same as “God works in mysterious ways.” It’s deferring proof to a more legitimate source.
That’s the key: average people like me don’t actually know much about how the universe works, but we believe that somebody does—some highly-trained scientific expert. We believe that science has the answers.
Our instinct (or maybe practical need) to believe in something that can explain existence hasn’t been destroyed in the modern age, it’s just shifted from religion to science. We have faith in science.
How we should worship science?
The core of religious worship is faith. Believing in something, whatever it may be, is the bare minimum of practicing most religions.
So what does it mean that we have faith in science? Well, just as we worship God by believing in Him, we worship science by believing in it.
It sounds strange to suggest that modern people, particularly atheists and agnostics, are worshipping science. But it only sounds so bizarre because we’ve convinced ourselves that we are somehow a more-evolved kind of human beyond ignorant worship. But we’re not. We worship like humans always have.
It may seem more logical to worship science than to worship God: with experiments and the rigorous scientific method, science can prove itself.
But the thing is, we prove science with science just like we used to prove religion with religion. We’ve always had ways of “proving” the legitimacy of the things we worship. We now often reject religious proof, so who’s to say that later people won’t reject scientific proof?
In a scientific world, it’s common sense that science is true. But in a religious world, it’s common sense that God is real.
More importantly, the average person won’t often see—and if they did, won’t often understand—the proof that expert scientists produce. Instead, we have faith in science without really understanding it.
I don’t want to suggest we shouldn’t believe science. That’s not what I’m saying at all. We have science, and by extension belief in it, to thank for the comfort of modern life. There’s nothing wrong with worshipping science.
But we should recognize that science is not one thing: it’s a body of ever-changing, self-contradictory, incomplete knowledge. And it’s a human creation.
We should also recognize the nature of our relationship with science: we believe it has the answers but we don’t actually know what those answers are.
We need a more conscious worship, one which acknowledges the imperfect nature of science and the nature of our faith in it.
If I didn’t have faith in science, I would be paralyzed by constant confusion and frustration about the universe. We all would. Science allows us to believe that our questions do have answers. We may not have them, but someone does. And if nobody does, somebody is working on finding them.
But what do we do when science cannot answer a question? Or disagrees with itself? Or, even worse, is flat-out incorrect? Do we stop believing in science?
No. We redefine it—”that wasn’t science because it wasn’t true.” But redefining science is a dangerous game. If we constantly change what science is as we learn new things, we could easily begin to redefine it to fit political or social goals.
A better way?
I have a different suggestion. Instead of worshipping science, and having to constantly redefine it, we can worship goodness or Quality itself.
The truth is, science, religion, and art are all lenses through which we’ve glimpsed Quality. When we worship a god, we worship a good and benevolent one. When we talk about the importance of science, we’re really talking about the importance of good science. The art that we care about is good art.
We worship Quality things: good science, good art, good gods, and so on. If they weren’t Quality, we wouldn’t care about them. What we really care about—what we’ve been worshipping all along—is Quality itself.
If we recognize that what actually matters to us is Quality, not the vehicles of Quality like science or art, we can be even more aware in our worship. And the more aware we are, the better.
The next time you feel yourself having faith in something, whether it’s science or God or even a trusted friend, remember that what you really believe in is the Quality that your object of faith is carrying.
