John Wilkins has just posted an elegant take-down of that silly “science depends on faith” op-ed piece in the NYT:

I have a rule (Wilkins’ Law #35, I think) that if any scientist is going to draw unwarranted metaphysical conclusions, it will be a physicist, and in particular a cosmologist. Witness Paul Davies in the New York Times.
Davies wants to argue something like this:
Premise: there are laws of the universe and we cannot explain the existence of laws
Premise: the assumption that laws are to be found is the basis for doing science
Conclusion: Ergo, science rests on an act of faith

As Wilkins points out,

This is what Alfred North Whitehead once called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”, also known as the Fallacy of Reification (by me, anyway). Take words and declare them properties of the universe.

I’ve always felt that this fallacy lies at the heart of the Bible-based religions Christianity. Take, for instance, the very first sentence in their book. “In the beginning was the word.” Rubbish. In the beginning was the world, or the cosmos, or whatever you want to call it. Recently, certain organisms evolved a capacity for language, and used words to describe the world. Sometimes the descriptions work well enough that we can treat them as law-like. Mostly not. Their accuracy, or otherwise, doesn’t affect the facts of the world. Wilkins again:

As Maynard Smith used to say to lunchers in his cafeteria, “Are you discussing words, or the world? If it is the world, I will stay, but if it is words, I will go”.