Leon
Wieseltier
The
Scientistic movement cuts across many boundaries. It includes, but is not
limited to, atheism. One major facet of its ideology which has been especially
important to atheism is the transformation of knowledge to technique. I refer
to Barrett’s concept of the illusion of technique, of which I spoke in chapter
one. The first move is a reduction of knowledge from a multiplicity of forms to
one thing only, scientific knowledge. Then scientific knowledge lends itself to
the working of technique in shaping our understanding by manipulating reality
and thus truth. This reduction of knowledge to scientific data, is reflected on
the popular internet site answers.com. One such question asked: “is science the
supreme form of knowledge?” The answer it gives us is, “Science is the only
form of knowledge. There is no way to know something without it being
scientific in some way.”[1] It
goes to ask “what is science knowledge the answer is “science knowledge is the
understanding of everything around us how they process or work. To have Science
knowledge it will allow you to have good explanations of many things…”[2]
It reads like it’s written by a third grader. Science knowledge is everything,
nothing escapes it, and it gives good explanations of many things, not all
things? It gives a little testimonial just incase the definition doesn’t sound
quite right. That its good for explaining things.
In popular
terms, the site “debate.org” has a debate on the question “is science the only
source of true knowledge.” That should at least reflect the fact that people
are asking the question. Their straw poll, which is of course not scientific
and not representative, shows 44% of people who visited the sight, says yes
science is the only form of true knowledge.” 56% say “no.” It’s true that even
with a specialized computer going audience the ‘no’s’ have it, yet 44% is a
large percentage.[3] They quote Hume:
“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”[4] English Commedian Ricky Gervias is featured in a piece for Wall Street Journal, “why I am an Atheist.” He says:
“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”[4] English Commedian Ricky Gervias is featured in a piece for Wall Street Journal, “why I am an Atheist.” He says:
People who believe in God don’t need
proof of his existence, and they certainly don’t want evidence to the contrary.
They are happy with their belief. They even say things like “it’s true to me”
and “it’s faith.” I still give my logical answer because I feel that not being
honest would be patronizing and impolite. It is ironic therefore that “I don’t
believe in God because there is absolutely no scientific evidence for his
existence and from what I’ve heard the very definition is a logical
impossibility in this known universe,” comes across as both patronizing and
impolite.[5]
That’s an example of how deeply this kind of thinking as
been absorbed by the popular level.
Austin
Cline is a blogger and an expositor of atheist opinion. He writes about the
nature of scientific knowledge defending the statement “God does not exist,” as
a scientific statement. If we examine his view it turns out that the reason he
says it is because he’s reduced the nature of knowledge to his understanding of
science. He says that objecting to the statement on the grounds that God is
beyond scientific proof is a misunderstanding of what the statement means. The
statement, “God does not exist” (as a scientific statement) means that it can’t
be proved by scientific means. If it can’t be proved then it doesn’t exist.
That’s the same as saying “my view is all there is.”
When a scientist says "God does not exist," they mean something
similar to when they say "aether does not exist," "psychic
powers do not exist," or "life does not exist on the moon."
All such statements are casual short-hand for a more elaborate and
technical statement: "this alleged entity has no place in any scientific
equations, plays no role in any scientific explanations, cannot be used to
predict any events, does not describe any thing or force that has yet been
detected, and there are no models of the universe in which its presence is either
required, productive, or useful." [6]
I’ve never actually seen a scientist who says that, except
for the professional atheists such as Dawkins. Even Dawkins doesn’t actually
say that he’s making a scientific statement. One might think that the
comparison to aether is not valid, seeing the Michaelson/Moraelly experiments as
disproof of the possibility of aehter. Technically all they really did was fail
to find any evidence in favor of aether and the modern scientific understanding
of the universe failed to produce a place for it.[7]
That’s really the point Cline makes, science doesn’t have to disprove God, just
not finding a place for God means God doesn’t exist (for scientism) because
scientism only accepts that for which science makes a place. In other words, by
this method, knowledge is reduced all other forms to science alone, or least to
their reading of science alone. Cline himself rejects an absolutist position
(of disproof) on the part of science. “What should be most obvious about the
technically accurate statement is that it is not absolute. It does not deny for
all time any possible existence of the entity or force in question.”[8]
Of course it doesn’t have to. Since it has mandated a methodology that excludes
God sense it only allows that which is found in sense data, then God will never
meet the requirement unless he wants to submit to scientific scrutiny. God
seems to have his own ideas about being in charge, so this is not likely. The
effect is only things that compare to scientific methods can be considered
knowledge. That is only a good argument if one only accepts religious belief as
a scientific hypothesis. The assumption is clearly that science is the only
from of knowledge and if it’s not scientific then it’s not worthy to be known.
The point is that for scientism (and New atheism) science is the only valid form of knolwedge.
Jerry A.
Coyne argues that science is the only valid form of knowledge and he doesn’t
mind castigating the arts in doing it. On his blog[9]
he takes to task Patrick MacNamara, the professor in Neurology at Boston
University who edits the series of
books on Where God and Science Meet.[10] In
the course the discussion Coyne begins to argue that science is the only from
of knowledge, only scientific knowledge can be validated. He says:
First, music, literature and poetry don’t produce any truths about the
universe that don’t require independent verification by empirical and rational
investigation: that is, through science (broadly interpreted). These fine
arts don’t convey to us anything factual about the world unless those
facts can be replicated by reason, observation or experiment. All of the
other “truths” from the arts fall into the class of “emotional realizations.”
I may, for example, feel a oneness with humanity from reading Tolstoy, or
a feeling that I need to “seize the day” from watching Never Let Me Go.
While one might consider these things worthwhile knowledge, with
“knowledge” defined broadly, they are not what we atheists—and many of the
faithful—mean by “truths.”[11]
His reasoning is pretty convoluted. Literature and poetry
don’t produce truths because they don’t require independent verification.
That’s a statement not in evidence. Just because they don’t require his kind of
verification doesn’t mean they don’t require any. That may be what personal
experience is for. Or that may be what other literature is for. Moreover, who
says that knowledge has to be verified to be knowledge? That’s only the case if
you already accept up front that scientific knowledge is the only kind. I think
that writers like Coyne are merely demonstrating the failure of our educational
system to instill within the students in its charge a love of learning or a
sense of the humanities. At the very least his position is begging the
question. He doesn’t understand the nature of literature or what it does for
you, and he takes it very literally and tries to approach it like science. We
can see this in his statement:
when you read a novel like Anna
Karenina, you know it’s fiction: if from the endeavor you realize
things about yourself, or about human emotions, you are not required to sign
onto the genuine physical existence of Count Vronsky or Karenin. In
contrast, emotional realizations that derive from faith require absolute belief
in a number of ridiculous, incorrect, or unverifiable propositions.[12]
.
He does understand that fiction is fiction but then why
can’t he extrapolate from that to the nature of religion? He thinks religious
belief has to be literal. It can’t refer to emotions or internal states. That
feeling stuff is not truth that’s just stories.
He issues his own challenge to believers: “tell me exactly what
‘knowledge’ religion has provided that is not derivable from secular reason.
Like Hitchens, I still have not received an answer.” [13]He
sure will. I’ll send him a copy of this book.
Why would anyone think that reality one discovers in God is not
knowledge or that it’s not “real?” Why shouldn’t it be verifiable? But why must
it be verifiable in scientific terms? Spiritual knowledge is real; Knowledge of
God is real knowledge. Noetic knowledge from mystical experience is real.
Historical knowledge is real knowledge that can pertain to religious teaching.
It’s absurdly silly to say that science is the only true knowledge. I’ll go into greater elaboration on this in
the chapter on supernatural. This will all be discussed in the chapters on
supernatural (chapter nine) and perspective (chapter 10).
Peter
Atkins writes, in “Science as Truth,” that “…there can be no denying that
science is the best procedure yet discovered for exposing fundamental truths
about the world…This claim of universe competence may seem arrogant, but it
appears to be justified.”[14]
He points to science’s experimentation guided by elaboration and improvement of
theory as the basis of scientific acuity. He points to the function, the
success, the “science works” aspect to demonstrate the truth of science. “No
other mode of discovery has proved to be so effective or to contribute so much
toward the achievement or aspirations of humanity.”[15]
Like Atkins those who defend Scientism and who seek to reduce all human
knowledge to one form of knowledge, scientific, usually claim to do so in the
name of humanity. Yet in so doing they threaten to destroy not only some of the
most cherished aspects of human knowledge but humanity itself. This is no ideal
threat. There are four major harms impending as a result of this movement:
(1) Loss of the arts as a valid understanding of human being
(2) Loss of human freedom as a value in society,
(3) Loss of humanity itself in the face of technological
augmentation
(4) Separation from God.
The process
of reducing knowledge to just scientific knowledge alone was at work eroding
the value of the arts through most of the twentieth century. George Richmond
Walker wrote a fine article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, way
back in 1964. In that article, “Art, Science, and Reality,” he demonstrated
that civilization has always assumed that knowledge spread over a wide variety
of subject matters and disciplines. Knowledge belongs to all the endeavors of
humanity, they were all worthy of being called by that name, especially the
arts. As sited in the first chapter, Dewy and the positivists were skeptical
that the arts provide knowledge, yet, “in times past there have been many
thinkers who asserted or assumed that art as well as science reveals something
of the true nature of the actual world.”[16]
He cites Plato and Aristotle who say that art is a form of knowledge. I would
not expect Plato and Aristotle to cut much ice in this day and age. He adds,
“religion was understood and is still generally believed to be concerned with
reality of some kind.”[17]
He quotes the philosopher Bosanquet “the spirit of art is faith in ‘life and
divinity with which the external world is inspired so that the idealizations
that are characteristic of art are not so much imaginations that depart from
reality as they are revelations of the life and divinity that is alone ultimate
reality.’”[18] Richmond
argues that modern science is giving us an exacting knowledge of the external
world but through quantum theory we know that the essential substance of the
world is mathematical not physical and external. Thus he grounds true knowledge
in experience of the world, which is reflected through the arts as well as
science. He sites Whitehead in saying that neither physical nature nor life can
be understood without understanding the interconnections that can only be
understood through experience. He bases this view in a monism that speaks of
the interconnections of all things, thus to screen off just one aspect such as
the objective quantifiable aspects that science provides and ignore the
experiential that the artistic provides is merely to miss the whole. We are not
missing just one aspect but the whole.[19]
All knowledge is generated by experience and the only thing we know of that
brings experience to the table is humanity. He makes the point that we don’t
know what we are approaching as a species or what we are unleashing but we do
know we can’t escape being human. We are finally confined to our humanity and
art is our unique expression as humans that reflect our experience in ways that
allows us to bridge the known.
Leon
Wieseltier, literary editor of the New
Republic, gave the commencement address at Brandeis
University in 2013. Peter Lawler
wrote an article for The Standard based upon that speech.[20]
He pointed out the threat to the arts and thus to freedom from scientism and
technologism. He points to Neuroscientists who seek to displace theology,
philosophy, poetry. This is the idea that there is a ready genetic explanation
for all we do and that understanding brain function is to understand all that
there is to know. We can see that through Cyone’s literalistic approach to
literature. The technologism of which he speaks is a good example of what I
talk about in chapter one under the heading of “illusion of technique.” the
idea that we can do anything, we can manipulate the world to match our desires,
thus we control meaning and truth. Yet this only applies to one form of
knowledge, science, and all other forms will all but wither away. This is
because science feeds technology, the basis of manipulation and control.
Reduction
of knowledge to science will only result in a loss of freedom; free speech,
freedom of action, political freedom. Back in the 1970s B.F. Skinner achieved
fame and notoriety with his work Beyond Freedom and Dignity[21], in which he
argued that freedom and dignity were concepts holding us back from saving the
planet. He pointed to pollution and world hunger and agued that we were not
doing the things needed to be done because ideas of human freedom stood in the
way. We are not willing make the impositions on the individual that need to be
made to illicit the proper human behavior. He advocated using operant
conditioning. Skinnerism found a wide audience for a time but then I think
society began to take a real look at what he was talking about and decided
human freedom and dignity were worth keeping. Skinner’s school of thought made
an impact in clinical psychology, the giving tokens for rewards in exchange for
behavior, this school was called “behaviorism.” We began to figure out that
freedom and dignity are two of the things that make life worth living. Losing
them is losing some of the thing for which we want the world made safe and
preserved so that we might enjoy them. Saving the world at the expense of those
is like destroying the village to save it. Wieseltier points to Marxism as an
example of what the scientistic mentality does to freedom.[22]
Determinism
is the outcome of scientism: because we know it all we can study and understand
what causes everything, thus we have proved that there is No free will. Because
there’s no free will there is no problem taking away political freedom. All we
need to do is tell the sheep they won’t miss it because they only think they
want it anyway. There is no greater threat to freedom then the philosophical
twaddle that rationalizes it’s loss with a lot of nonsense about how veg the
concept of freedom is. Daniel Dennett tries to answer by showing that he
believes in freedom politically and lives free in a deterministic world because
determinism cuts down on randomness. Randomness is what destroys freedom
because you can’t predict the future in reliable way,[23]
while determinism doesn’t mean inevitability.[24]
To pull this off Dennett uses some slick tricks. To prove determinism is not
inevitable but allows freedom he does two things; first, he uses the analogy of
a bullet, its trajectory is inevitable if unblocked, but we have a bullet proof
vest the striking is not inevitable. Of course the problem is that it assumes
we can think freely to act. If our thoughts and desires are also controlled,
then we can’t act freely to wear the vest. With Harris’s ideas of determinism,
for example, all causes are the same as determinism and for him free will is
just a illusion.[25] Thus we can’t think
freely to wear the vest. The second thing Dennett does is to compare scientific
determinism to belief in God. He refers to aspects of belief a lot. He refers
to the Deus ex Machina[26]
(don’t look now, not a Biblical concept). The reason is because he expects us
to accept that by comparison scientific determinism is less inevitable and
controlling than the concept of fate, which he links to God or the divine. A
large portion of the book is aimed at disproving notions of free will, which
means he’s just doing the reductionist trick (see chapter “reductionism,”
chapter 5) reducing reality to the bit he can control then claims that’s all
there is. Loss of free will isn’t a problem because free will is not very
expansive anyway. Based upon this lackluster performance of its defense we can
assume it is in grave danger. One can only imagine how this tactic would be
applied by the real purveyors of power in a world ran by the dictates of
scientism.
We have to wait until Friday to find out
Sources
[1] Answers.com “Is Science
the Supreme form of knowledge?” Internet resource: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_science_the_supreme_form_of_knowledge (accessed 12/27/13).
Answers.com is owned by the Answers corporation began
in Israel. The
name domain name was purchansed by Bill Gose and Hendrick Jones. The domain
name sold to guru net based in Israel.
[3] Debate.Org, “Is Science
the Only True Source of Knowledge?” owned by Juggle,
LLC online resource:
http://www.debate.org/opinions/is-science-the-only-source-of-true-knowledge accessed 12/31/13.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ricky Gervais, “Ricky
Gervais: Why I am An Atheist.” Wall Street Journal: Arts and Entertainment. (Dec. 19, 2010). Online copy: http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/12/19/a-holiday-message-from-ricky-gervais-why-im-an-atheist/
accessed 12/31/13.
[6] Austin Cline,
“Scientifically God Does Not Exist: Science allows us to say God Does not
Exist, there is role for God in science, no explanation that God can provide.”
About.com, Agnosticism/Atehism. Online publication: http://atheism.about.com/od/argumentsagainstgod/a/GodScience.htm accessed 12/27/13.
[7] Richard
Staley, (2009), "Albert Michelson, the Velocity of Light, and the Ether
Drift", Einstein's generation. The origins of the relativity revolution,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-77057-5
[8] Ibid.
[9] Jerry A. Coyne, “Once
Again, Does Religion Produce Knowledge,” Why Evolution is True, blog, Mya 4, 20/11. URL: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/once-again-does-religion-produce-knowledge/
accessed 12/27/13. Coyne Ph.D. , is professor of Ecology and
Evolution at University of Chicago.
From his blog: “Coyne has written over 110 refereed scientific papers and 80
other articles, book reviews, and columns, as well as a scholarly book about
his field (Speciation, co-authored with H. Allen Orr). He is a
frequent contributor to The New Republic, The Times Literary
Supplement, and other popular periodicals..”
[10] Patrick McNamara ed., Where
God and Science Mee:How Brain and Evolutionary Experiences Alter Our
Understanding of Religion, volumes I-III. Westport
CT:Praeger Publishers, 2006.
[11] Coyne, Op. Cit.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Peter Atkins, “Science
as Truth,” History of the Human Sciences, Volume 8, no 2 (1995) 97-102
Attkins is former professor of Chemistry at Oxford,
author of many books, scholarly and popular. He’s well known as an atheist and
speaks and writes on behalf of atheism.
[15] Ibid.
[16] George Richmond
Walker, Op. cit. 9.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[20] Peter Augustine Lawler,
“Defending the Humanities,” The Weekly Standard, Jun 17, 2013, Vol. 18, No. 38, 2013.
from the Online copy Jan 1, 2014 http://www.weeklystandard.com/keyword/Scientism accessed 1/1/14.
[21] B.F. Skinner, Beyond
Freedom and Dignity, New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1971. 1.
[22] Quoted in Lawler, Op. Cit.
[23] Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom
Evolves, New York: Penguin
Books, 2004, 13, 309.
[24] Ibid, 56.
[25] Sam Harris, Free Will, New York:
Free Press, 2012.,10.
[26] Dennett, Freedom
Evolves, Op cit. 47.
