UPDATE: Do you trust me?
Moments after writing Do you trust me?, I came across an article in September, 2008′s physicsworld magazine. The lead-in begins…
“Scientists and those people with religious convictions may have sharply contrasting beliefs, says Robert P Crease, but does that forbid them from having stimulating conversation?”
It’s an interesting article that goes on…
…both groups have to trust something intangible: the scientific life and the religious life, respectively. For at the core, if sometimes not the surface, of science and religion is a kind of humility. For scientists, it is the awareness that we do not know enough about the natural world; we know only fragments, and not all that we can. For the religious — and especially for Christians, Jews and Muslims — the humility lies in the awareness that the way we humans ordinarily lead our lives is imperfect; that we are not all that we can be. The idea that the truly religious life is marked by humility and the awareness of one’s own ignorance is hardly controversial, and is the thesis of the New York University theologian James P Carse’s new book The Religious Case Against Belief.
And concludes…
Trust, then, is one issue about which both scientists and the religious have a backlog of experiences that might be mutually illuminating. It would be interesting to see what would happen if we got them talking, not about their beliefs, but about how they form and defend those beliefs. That would be a conversation worth overhearing.
I e-mailed Alex Todd with TrustEnablement.com and asked for his thoughts. Based on his research and theories, he had this to say…
That’s an interesting article. I agree with the thesis that trust underpins both science and religion. The fundamental difference is their preferred sources of trust. Humility is a risk transference mechanism that manifests itself as deference, which in my Trust Enablement(r) Framework serves to rebuild lost or deficient trust. It is the most efficient starting point for developing trust that, when it works, stimulates a virtuous spiral of mutual reciprocity, resulting in increasing levels of trust.
