Posted on 01/29/2009 2:04:50 PM PST by Sopater
Exposing Scientism
In his inaugural address, President Obama said he would “restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality.” By this, many suspect he means to spend taxpayer money on embryonic stem cell research, which destroys humans at the embryonic stage.
Evidently, President Obama has been listening to those who want research funded, some because they are driven by greed but many others driven by a dangerous worldview called scientism.
As Nancy Pearcey and I write in our book, How Now Shall We Live?, scientism has its roots in Darwinism. Tufts University professor Daniel Dennett writes that Darwinism, rightly understood, is a “universal acid” that dissolves away all traditional moral, metaphysical, and religious beliefs. For if humans have evolved by a material, purposeless process, then there is no basis for believing in a God who created us and revealed moral truths, or imposing those moral views in any area of life.
Dennett is using a common tactic—using science as a weapon to shoot down religious faith. The standard assumption is that science is objective knowledge, while religion is an expression of subjective need. Religion, therefore, must subordinate its claims about the world to whatever science decrees.
Scientism assumes that science is the controlling reality about life, so anything that can be validated scientifically ought to be done. Other things are subjective fantasy—like love, beauty, good, evil, conscience, ethics.
So science, which originally simply meant the study of the natural world, has in this view been conflated with scientific naturalism, a philosophy that the natural world is all that exists.
Humans are reduced to “objects” that can be inspected, experimented on, and ultimately controlled. In 1922, G.K. Chesterton warned that scientism had become a “creed” taking over our institutions, a “system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics.”
C.S. Lewis warned that the rise of scientific naturalism would lead to “the abolition of man,” for it denies the reality of those things central to our humanity: a sense of right and wrong, of purpose, of beauty, of God.
And if we deny the things that make us truly human, by definition we create a culture that is inhuman—a culture that, for example, embraces moral horrors like the killing of humans at the earliest stage of life on the spurious grounds that doing so might cure other people’s diseases. Or cloning. Or medical experiments on humans, as the Nazis conducted.
Our task is to expose the flaws in scientific naturalism—not because we are against science but because we want it to fill its proper role as a means of investigating God’s world and alleviating suffering within ethical boundaries.
And it’s right that we should be doing this because it was a Christian view of reality that led to the scientific method, investigating all the things God has created.
I hope that the President, in using those words, understood the difference between good science and scientism.
Obama’s science, bought and paid for.
Where do you wish to draw the line of which science should not cross?
When it crosses over to philosophy.
As if there was a hard black line between “science” and “philosophy”!
Generally, this translates into “I don’t like the conclusion, therefore it’s not science”.
Nothing about that is "putting science in it's rightful place."
Science is an ONGOING process of understanding. NOT a policy.
Especially you and your ilk.
1. Whenever the scientific method fails it.
2. Whenever ethical norms are violated.
Darwinism, for example, is fine when it explains artificial selection within the given created species. We observe that with dogs and plants. That’s scientific method. It fails to explain origin of species: we do not observe one complex species mutating into another stable species.
Medical science cures disease. That is fine. Contraception cures no disease, it breaks what works. That is not fine. Abortion and embryonic stem cell research kill human life. That is not good either.
Or crosses over to politics. Evolutionist agitprop in schools, for example, has nothing to do with understanding origins of species, and a lot to do with dumbing down the young.
Colson needs to stop confusing what he sees at 3 AM on The Late Late B-Movie Show with a science documentary.
It adjusts the functioning of the body to the user's wishes, just like any of a thousand other technological advances.
>>As if there was a hard black line between “science” and “philosophy”!
Generally, this translates into “I don’t like the conclusion, therefore it’s not science”.
Traditionally, Philosophy IS a science, the organized body of knowledge that attempts to explain everything in terms of ultimate causes. What in the modern world has come to be regarded as “science” is a subset of Philosophy, that is an organized body of knowledge that attempts to explain natural things in terms of contingent causes.
I assume that you've sent congratulatory messages to the O. J. Simpson criminal jury for doing the right thing?
After all, not a single witness observed him murdering anyone; ergo, he was innoncent.
All the above.
It is science if it is testable. If it is not testable, it is philosophy.
In his inaugural address, President Obama said he would “restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality.”
NewSpeak for a further denigration of religious values, elevation of secular humanism, and an increase in taxes to cover the gamut of Statist programs. This has been a failure everywhere it’s been tried, but it seems that everyone in America these days is intent on ignoring the lessons of history and reinventing the wheel. Santayana comes to mind; however, the intervening disaster will be - and has already become - catastrophic for the nation and its people.
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