Creationists and science skeptics often claim that science, like any belief system, is based on faith. When scientific and religious ideas conflict, then, there is ultimately no objective basis for choosing one over the other; faith in science is really no different than faith in religion.

This type of argument actually has merit–but only as a critique of the verificationist paradigm of scientific method. Verificationism itself is logically flawed, though (falling prey to the problem of induction), so it must ultimately rest on tenets of faith. Verificationism looks for positive proof of existence and accompanies the belief that Truth is manifest; in a sense, religion and verificationism both rest on the premise that Truth, whether by divine revelation or proven theory, is knowable.

The falsificationist description of scientific inquiry, on the other hand, is not concerned with whether or not we can know Truth–even if we stumble upon a theory that is True, we could never recognize it as such! Falsificationism itself is a logical process, not one based on the faith-based belief in the attainability of Truth, and thus can be reasonably preferred when comparing with certain religious interpretation.

This overstates the case a bit, of course, for falsification assumes we can recognize when an idea is disproved; in a sense, falsification takes for granted that we can trust our own experiences. Perhaps we should take this on faith as well, but it seems to me that continual distrust of our own experiences would create dysfunction–total chaos or total apathy.