My brief review of the anthology
Scientism: Prospects and Problems,
edited by Jeroen de Ridder, Rik Peels,
and René van Woudenberg, appears in the December 2019 issue of Review of Metaphysics. (The preview you see in that link leaves out
only the last paragraph and a half or so of the review.)
Nice to see that there are people taking scientism as a problem that needs dealing with, not an assumption that needs to be shoved down your throat.
ReplyDeleteI subscribe to your comment, friend. The pity is that discuss this problem, it seems, is a lost war (which needs, however, to be fought).
Delete@Tony, who has shoved scientism down your throat?
ReplyDeleteIt is an implicit and sometimes explicit assumption of many science popularizers (Hawking, DeGrasse Tyson, Nye, Carroll) and philosophers who eschew metaphysics. The idea that the only knowledge has to be natural scientific is common in the popular areas.
DeleteThe rest of the review can be seen by clicking on the next book and looking at the bottom of the page.
ReplyDeleteWho has shoved scientism down my throat? I'd say briefly (1) the items I've studied involving Darwinism and origins (however limited they are) generally have spent a large bulk of time not arguing that Darwinism is true, but that Darwinism is science, as if showing something is "not science" renders it not considerable as evidence; (2) "scientific biblical criticism" of the 19th century, which made approaching the text in anything resembling the orthodox way obsolete (in their eyes) and setting the stage for all of the silly critical theories and rampant antisupernatual assumptions in modern biblical scholarship today; (3) There is a large degree of pop-culture scientism and a denigration of metaphysics: most of the classical sci-fi that I read (esp. Asimov), the arguments for true artificial intelligence and consciousness presuppose a materialistic view of mind, which strikes me as a type of scientism. I could give more examples, but that's an off-the-cuff quickie response. The more educated readers here can doubtless tell me that I'm conflating materialism too much with scientism, but on my practical layman level, they go hand in hand pretty well.
ReplyDeleteTwo questions for Ed, and one for the rest of you:
ReplyDeleteEd, are pro-scientism arguments by Ladyman and Kornblith any better than Rosenberg's are do they fall victim to the usual pitfalls (e.g. self-refuting)?
Also, did you ever respond to Oppy's article on Stage 1 of the Aristotelian proof? I'd be very curious about that.
For everyone else, are we still having discussions at https://classicaltheism.createaforum.com/philosophy/ ?
The board doesn't seem anywhere near as active as the old one.
Mike, the forum has declined in activity quite a bit. From what I can tell there are just a few people who post every week or so. I'm not sure if Ed is aware that we've changed the location of the forum so he has the old forum linked in his recommended sites. Perhaps, Ed, if you're reading this you could give us a shout out on your next open thread.
Deletehttps://classicaltheism.createaforum.com/index.php
Wait a minute. I have read many assurances that there really is no such thing as "scientism"; that it is a red herring made up by religious believers. That includes a number of comments on this blog.
ReplyDeleteBut they came up with seven defenders, of something no one believes?
What gives?
Tony, Jon, Eric:
ReplyDeleteMy contrarian experience with scientism is not that it's "shoved down my throat," but that it's used as a cudgel to shut down discussion or criticism. I'm often tempted to respond to "The Science is Settled" with a punch in the face. Purely as an attention step, of course.
In my studies of the arguments for or against essential Mosaic authorship or collating of the Pentateuch, I'm struck at how much of the critical arguments implicitly rely on the idea that only assuming an anti-supernatural viewpoint allows one to really get behind the text. The possibility that Yahweh exists and talked to Moses and commanded him to write appears to be ruled out from the very beginning. The German liberal critical scholars in the 19th century had this "the assured results of modern criticism" attitude that I find comical in arrogance. Somewhere in the late 19th or early 20th century, despite not having all that strong a case (in my opinion) they won over the institutions.
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