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Superstition and faith are not necessarily the same thing. Science involves no superstition, but it does involve a heaping helping of faith. Faith that all of "reality" can be divined by humans by way of the scientifici method. Many of our greatest scientists (such as Einstein) recognized the folly of such "faith" in science to devine all knowledge.

First of all, science is not like religion. There is no accepted authority in science that makes declarations like, "we believe all of reality can be divined by humans by way of the scientific method." Science is a method for discovering the truth about certain aspects of reality, namely, material or physical existense and its nature. The other view of science is the body of knowledge thus far discovered by that method. There is no version of science that is an attempt (or has any expectation or desire) to "divine all knowldge," or, as a matter of fact, even most of it.

Science is only one branch of intellectual inquirey. There is also philosophy, and history, and mathematics which is a sort-of sub-category of both science and philosophy. There are the arts and the greatest body of knoweldge of all, technology.

Where the idea came from that some people believe science is going to answer all human quesions I cannot imagine. As you point out, even Einstein was duped by this impression and felt compelled to comment on it. (A genius, true, but he couldn't tie is own shoes. Oh well.)

There is no "faith" in science, only observation. The objects of science existed before science, which only discovered them. There are some things some scientist would like to learn, if possible, that help understand how all the different characteristics of material existence can be integrated into a single explanatory concept or collection of concepts. There is no "faith" that this will be accomplished, only the steadily increasing impression, from what has already been learned, that such a "unifying" theory is possible, and maybe even likely. If it is accomplished, there will still be infinitely more things yet to be learned, even in the science, as any scientist will tell you.

Hank

Scientists have "faith" that they will uncover "truth" about a thing (whatever they set out to discover) .... using the scientific method. That seems a given to me, otherwise why would anyone undertake examining something if they have no believe that they can understand and/or explain? That is not rational.

Additionally, scientists know by now that sometimes they uncover a "truth" that they did not undertake to discover or prove. However, they have faith that a "truth" will be revealed to them about something, somewhere along the line, othewise, scientific investigation would be futile.

Faith is rational because before one acts, one must have faith that a succesful outcome will be the result, if not now, then eventually. This is true in general life (one has faith when crossing the road that one will get to the other side), but it is also true in the realm of scientific investigation. Those who are inclined to uncover truth though scientific methods, have faith in those methods, that they will, at some point, lead to knowledge previously unknown about "reality".

btw, Einstein did point out that not everything can be known (but he did not imply that anyone was trying to know everything). However, he did go so far as to say perhaps not everything we endeavor to know should be known. He felt that mystery in and of itself was worthwhile to humans. He did not say we should not undertake to explain things, in spite of the probable futility of knowing "some" things). All and some are not mutually exclusive since we would not know we know "all" if we happened to get there. This is part of the mystery and uncertainty inherent in the discipline of "science" he was speaking of. It is corollary to spiritual faith where, supposing God exists, we would not know "all" or enough to prove such. Ergo faith.