"Taking Science on Faith"

Here is a very interesting editorial in, of all places, today's NYT. Here is a representative excerpt:

Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on
belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained
God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen
universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science
fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.

This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the
Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way.
Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe,
while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent
realm of perfect mathematical relationships.

And just as Christians claim that the world depends utterly on God for
its existence, while the converse is not the case, so physicists declare a
similar asymmetry: the universe is governed by eternal laws (or meta-laws), but
the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe.

It seems to me there is no hope of ever explaining why the physical
universe is as it is so long as we are fixated on immutable laws or meta-laws
that exist reasonlessly or are imposed by divine providence. The alternative is
to regard the laws of physics and the universe they govern as part and parcel of
a unitary system, and to be incorporated together within a common explanatory
scheme.

In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the
universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that
explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a
testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is
manifestly bogus.