It's one of the classic conflicts of our time and the ultimate personal paradox - the grand battle between what we know, and what we think we know. In a world where science and technology pervades almost every aspect of modern day living, a lot of people find it hard to 'keep the faith'. No one likes to blur the lines - everything has to be explained and explainable, or it's quickly consigned to the nonsense pile.
Instead of co-existing happily, science and faith are constantly at loggerheads, with one trying to wrestle supreme dominance and authority from the other. It's certainly an acrimonious marriage of warring ideas - we still base the moral code of our children on the Ten Commandments, but at school they are taught that the world was most definitely not created in seven days by an invisible man in the clouds.
In the field of medicine, we are told to ignore holistic therapies and faith healing in favor of the tried and tested scientific methods, such as surgery and medication. In psychology seminars we are told to attribute every miracle and strange occurrence to a sequence of over-active neurons firing in the brain. Science has also succeeded in rubbishing the logic behind many established religions all around the world, and the work ethic in many classrooms today seems to suggest that if it can't be empirically proven, it doesn't exist. Indeed, more children today have laptops by their beds than Bibles.
So is it fair to say then that science has rendered faith obsolete? That religion is decidedly medieval and people need to look to something more concrete and tangible for guidance? Absolutely not. The embattled biology professors at Oxford and Cambridge can recite their theorems until they go blue in the face and keel over, but faith is just as crucial a part of twenty-first-century living as technology.
Science even utilizes faith in a number of very important ways. Of course, scientists become so profoundly demoralized when they are forced to admit that, just as believers can't prove the existence of their deities, they can't disprove the existence of faith. Take the example of the Placebo Effect - so called, because the pill or liquid taken as medication doesn't actually contain any scientific chemicals or pain-killing properties. You may even know someone who has been prescribed a course of placebo drugs; they are often given to known hypochondriacs in an attempt to correct a vicious cognitive cycle of noticing pain and ailments where there aren't any.
Needless to say, the very point of placebo drugs is to allow the patient to think himself better - in other words, to heal with faith and good will. That is the Placebo Effect - using positive mental attitude to combat illness. So it would appear to be the case that faith can be just as effective as anything manufactured by science when it comes to improving and managing our health. The assumption that it cannot is one of the most pernicious in the modern world.
Now of course placebo drugs are only given out in minor cases and only to combat minor ailments. If a patient is suffering from a cancer of a more severe problem, surgical intervention and reliable scientific methods are required. Though if we're to be pedantic, faith plays its part here also.
In most NHS institutions today, there's a small building attached to the main complex or built in near the wards where patients and their families can go to worship and say a few prayers - the hospital chapel. For centuries the chapel has been a crucial addition to every hospital in the UK, providing a safe, quiet space away from the frenetic pace of the wards and corridors where those who are grieving can do so in privacy. There are even many self-confessed atheists who will secretly turn to religion when matters take a turn for the worse - science can explain the demise of a human being, but it can't explain or nurture our reactions to that demise.
Whereas science, in this case, is responsible for possibly curing or treating the patient, it is faith that gets them through the mental struggle. The very fact that a lot of non-believers have suddenly professed their love for God on the deathbed just goes to show how big a desire we have to look up to something bigger than ourselves. For many people, that thing is not as tangible - or mundane - as straight-laced scientific theory. Such an idea is perhaps not surprising.
For centuries, we have created icons and deities to worship, and the Bible is still the best selling book of all time. We seem to be fascinated - or rather, preoccupied - with idolization (just take a look at the current state of celebrity culture) and our ancestors brought us up on a strict diet of faith, worship and religious ethics. Indeed, where better to look for an infallible moral code than the Bible or any other religious text? People certainly don't turn to the nearest chemistry textbook for a lesson in societal ethics.
In a similar vein, entire nations are set up on profoundly religious principles, not scientific ones. The Founding Fathers in America were pious Christians, and the current American constitution and legal system still reflects this rather heavily. Couple that with the fact that 66% of Americans are devoutly religious and church-going and we have a pretty strong case for an overarching faith-based authority at work in the world today.
Yet despite this, science has prevailed in many fields where faith cannot even hope to reach. It led to the design and manufacture of automobiles, mobile phones, computers, trains, planes, hardware, software - everything we view as necessities in modern life. But having said that, it's still quite hard to believe that every inventor behind some important scientific development or another was totally lacking in faith. Even the hardiest of scientists must say little prayers to themselves whilst waiting for an experiment to turn out, and it is evident that the entrepreneurial spirit is deeply rooted in faith - the ability to take criticism and try again until you succeed is not a mindset taught by the sciences, but by religion.
So is it more realistic to say that faith and science work side by side and share the responsibility in the modern world? No, because for that to happen they'd have to be mutually exclusive. They aren't. Science can never claim true authority because it cannot prove definitively that God doesn't exist, whereas faith exists - in some form or another - inside everyone. Whether we give such faith a name and a face and choose to follow it for the rest of our lives, or whether we believe that there's something mysterious and magical out there in the void - we all live on it.
Nations think they're governed by something called law but they're not. They're governed by morality and ethics, and these are emphatically not scientific principles. Science gives us nothing to follow and place hope in. It is merely a cripplingly long list of facts and figures, theorems and tables, all designed to do the impossible - decode the world and every human life living within it. I am inherently distrustful of anything or anyone who claims to be able to - and to want to - explain every single mystery in life. I'd rather let faith do the talking.