In The New York Times on February 19, 2006, Leon Weiseltier called scientism “one of the dominant superstitions of our day” in a review of a book about religion. One devotee of scientism is Lewis Wolpert, author of a book published in 2007 also about religion. Wolpert may have been thinking about this quote when he wrote:
It is now asserted by some that science itself is the modern superstition. (Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief, p. 159)
Perhaps Wolpert thinks scientism is an excessive love of science. As it is impossible to love science to excess, Wolpert might be reasoning, scientism is really an attack on science itself.
The scientistic fallacy, as scientism is sometimes called, occurs in different ways in different fields of study. The most maleficent form of scientism is the denial of existential truths. Existentialism and essentialism are two branches of metaphysics, which is a philosophical method of inquiry into the concept of being. Many modern philosophers proudly reject existentialism. This is what Sidney Hook says:
Metaphysics, then, can never tell us anything about the world independent of its relation to us, of what could be true of Being if there were no human beings (or would be if there were no human beings). (The Quest for Being, p. 150)
The question is, however, whether the word “being” has any meaning in a philosophical context, and by a philosophical context I mean any activity which inquires into the logic and the procedures by which knowledge is built up and described. (The Quest for Being, p. 159)
Wolpert and Hook are both atheists. Hook is open to existential reasoning, but Wolpert is only interested in scientific evidence, as the following two quotes show:
I am committed to science and believe it is the best way to understand the world. I am an atheist reductionist materialist. I know of no good evidence for the existence of God. (Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief, p. x)
I call myself a “God-seeker” because I am willing to go a long way, to the very ends of reason itself, to track down every last semblance of evidence or argument which promises fulfillment of the quest. (The Quest for Being, p. 115)
If it is true that reason and arguments leads to God’s existence, God’s existence is an existential truth and Wolpert and Hook are making an existential error.
An example of scientism is the following quote from cognitive scientist Merton Donald:
This book proposes a theory of consciousness that stays carefully on the functional level and does not to try to “explain” how awareness could have emerged from a material thing such as a brain. I believe that we might someday understand how this came to be. However, in my opinion, our present intellectual and scientific resources are not sufficient to give us even the beginnings of such a theory. (A Mind So Rare, p. 9)
Professor Donald has a whimsical and scientistic faith in science. In fairness to him, he is responding to philosopher Colin McGinn’s view that science cannot explain human consciousness as a matter of principle. McGinn’s argument, if I understand it correctly, is that there was never any evolutionary benefit to understanding human consciousness and, as a consequence, human beings—the result of evolution—don’t understand it.
The real scientism in the quote is Donald’s failure to acknowledge or grasp the truth of the existential proposition that human beings are conscious. The truth of this
RSS