Faith-based Science

This morning I was reading an article that started off like many others:

"Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue."

I was worried where he might end up. But in the article, Paul Davies points out the faith based system in which Science operates.

"The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould (NOMA) described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order."

Remember the NOMA Diagram (two tangental circles with no overlap). Davies is obviously arguing against a NOMA paradigm. He seems to be advocating an integration system but to what degree?

"Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe"

Davies is ambiguous in where he lands on the question of God...but his point is apt: "science and religion both have their basis in faith." (Read the whole article here)

The big question remains: who (or what) does Davies seem to be putting his faith in as the organizer and rule outside of this universe?