Three comments about scientism

Last updated on: December 9, 2017 at 7:33 pm by Dan Peterson

Three comments about scientism 2017-12-09T19:33:47-07:00 Dan Peterson

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On the campus at the University of California at Berkeley (Wikimedia Commons)

I came to know and admire Huston Smith (31 May 1919 – 30 December 2016) during the two months that I spent in Berkeley, California, in 1990 as part of a seminar led by him and sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Here’s a nice passage from him on scientism:

“For all we know, the larger part of the motive for trying to expand science is not self-serving; it is merely mistaken. The idealistic element in it is its desire to achieve in the understanding of man what science has achieved in the understanding of matter. Its mistake is in not seeing that the tools for the one are of strictly limited utility for the other, and that the practice of trying to see man as an object which the tools of science will fit leads first to underrating and then to losing sight of his attributes those tools miss. (The mere titles of B.F. Skinner’s “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” and Herbert Marcuse’s “One-Dimensional Man” will, in opposite ways, suffice.) If it be asked, “But what did the nonscientific approach to man and the world give us?” The answer is: “Meaning, purpose, and a vision in which everything coheres.”

Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions

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Sigmund Freud was, to be very mild about it, no friend of religion. (The “illusion” referred to in the title of his book The Future of an Illusion is, of course, theism.) But he recognized one of the problems in trying to eliminate religious belief — and, with some of its advocates, “scientism” seems to be making a bid to play exactly the role that he foresaw (and worried about):

“If you want to expel religion from our European civilization, you can only do it by means of another system of doctrines; and such a system would from the outset take over all the psychological characteristics of religion—the same sanctity, rigidity and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought—for its own defence. You have to have something of the kind in order to meet the requirements of education. And you cannot do without education.”

Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

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From a transcript of oral remarks given by John Lennox, emeritus professor of mathematics at Oxford University:

“[…] a view that we call ‘scientism’: and that is that science is the only way to truth, now that is just logically false, because the statement ‘science is the only way to truth’ is not a statement of science, so if it’s true, it’s false. Perhaps it’s too late at night for logic like that, is it?”

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