This sounds like the typical theist's semantic trick of trying to posit non-belief as a belief. Sort of like those chicks who chirp "Even not having an agenda is a kind of agenda." But being able to phrase it in such a way as to try and make it look like a belief system doesn't actually make it so.
Michael Polanyi was a wonderfully astute critic of the scientific enterprise. In Science, Faith, and Society (1946), he wrote:
Every interpretation of nature, whether scientific, non-scientific, or anti-scientific, is based on some intuitive conception of the general nature of things.... If the mind is uninformed by intuitive contact with reality, it is bound to place unreal and fruitless interpretations on the evidence before it.This "intuitive conception of the general nature of things" is a world view, or cosmology. The "rational skeptic" essentially denies, or tries to deny, spiritual reality altogether. And yet Polanyi believes that science itself is a spiritual enterprise. We may ask
...what the grounds are on which we hold the conviction that truth is real, that there is a general love of truth among men and a capacity to find it? These convictions ... have recently become involved in a fateful crisis. Our examination of the ultimate grounds on which our obligation to truth rests will therefore quite naturally turn into an analysis of the general crisis in which our civilization is involved today.I find it charming that Polanyi agrees with Aristotle: "All men desire to know." Yet lately, viewing the skeptical secularism that seems to have an increasingly iron grip on the social mind these days, I wonder how that statement can be defended. For it seems clear to me that NOT all men desire to know; it appears that skeptics, materialists, atheists, carve out their respective little fiefdoms by "consciously, deliberately" "NOT knowing" entire sectors of "inconvenient" Reality in which they are already fully, firmly, existentially engaged. (A clumsy way to put it, but the best I can do right now.)
This crisis has become most sharply manifest as a menace to all intellectual freedom based on the acceptance of a universal obligation to truth.... [T]he strictly limited nature of intellectual freedom had never been fully accepted by those who helped to establish it. They did not recognize that freedom cannot be conceived except in terms of particular obligations of conscience, the pursuit of which it permits and prescribes. They thought that freedom cannot mean the acceptance of any particular obligations and it is in fact incompatible with a prescription of its own limits. Freedom of thought in particular meant in their view the rejection of any kind of traditional beliefs, including, it would appear now, those on which freedom itself is based. They held that if any limits whatever were set to doubt, there would be no way of restraining intolerance and avoiding obscurantism....
Cartesian doubt and Locke's empiricism became ... the two powerful levers of further liberation from established authority. These philosophies and those of their disciples had the purpose of demonstrating that truth could be established and a rich and satisfying doctrine of man and the universe built up on the foundations of critical reason alone. Self-evident propositions or the testimony of the senses, or else a combination of the two, would suffice. Both Descartes and Locke maintained their belief in the revealed Christian doctrine. And though the later rationalists succeeding them tended toward deism or atheism they remained firm in their conviction that the critical faculties of man unaided by any powers of belief could establish the truth of science and the canons of fairness, decency, and freedom. Thinkers like Wells and John Dewey, and the whole generation of minds they reflect, still profess it today, and so do even those most extreme empiricists who profess the philosophy of logical positivism. They are all convinced that our main troubles still come from our having not altogether rid ourselves of all traditional beliefs and continue to set their hopes on further applications of the method of radical scepticism and empiricism.
It seems clear, however, that this method does not represent truly the process by which liberal intellectual life was in fact established. It is true that there was a time when the sheer destruction of authority did progressively release new discoveries in every field of inquiry. But none of these discoveries — not even those of science — were based on the experience of our senses aided only by self-evident propositions.... The method of disbelieving every proposition which cannot be verified by definitely prescribed operations would destroy all belief in natural science. And it would destroy, in fact, belief in truth and the love of truth itself which is the condition of all free thought. The method leads to complete metaphysical nihilism and thus denies the basis for any universally significant manifestation of the human mind....
It might be objected that sceptics have in fact continued to love and uphold both science and its sister domains, as well as the regime of objectivity and tolerance in general. But it only shows that people can carry on a great tradition even while professing a philosophy which denies its premisses. For the adherents of a great tradition are largely unaware of their own premisses, which lie deeply embedded in the unconscious foundations of practice.... Thus science has been carried on successfully for the last 300 years by scientists who were assuming that they were practicing the Baconian method, which in fact can yield no scientific results whatever. Far from realizing the internal contradiction in which they are involved, those practicing a tradition in the light of a false theory feel convinced — as have been generations of empiricists descending from Locke — that their false theories are vindicated by the success of their right practice. [Emphasis added.]
Or another way to put it: Skeptics (et al.) delight in "sawing off" the (ontological and epistemological) "branch" on which they sit, all the while insisting that the "tree" does not exist — so there can be "no harm"....
Polanyi believes that no society can be or remain free if it detaches itself from Truth.
We're dealing with this problem in spades right now. And that we see it reflected in so many of our present correspondents here at FR is deeply disheartening to me.
God bless and Godspeed, dear aruanan! Thank you ever so much for introducing the magisterial Michael Polanyi to this thread!