A Christian Apologist accuses me of scientism, and simultaneously demonstrates a spectacular lack of understanding of what that means.
1.1 The wrong definition
First he provides his own definition of the term: "that an unacknowledged faith-based subscription to the philosophy of mindless mechanistic materialism represents ultimate reality".
You may have noticed that's not a definition of scientism. If you strip away the superfluous words and tautology, all he is doing is saying that I'm a materialist.
1.2 The wrong person
Secondly he provides a quote from Rupert Murdoch which describes modern science: "give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest". Yes you're right - he's confused Rupert Murdoch with Rupert Sheldrake, which is amusing. But even funnier - the quote comes from Terence McKenna, who was a mystic and a psychonaut, and a believer in miracles.
1.3 The wrong definition (again)
The quote suggests that science is founded on a miracle, specifically the appearance of our universe from nothing. But this argument ignores the definition of "miracle"
"an extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore attributed to a divine agency."
According to Shekdrake...
"And the one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it from nothing at a single instant."
What Sheldrake (and McKenna) make the false assumption that the laws of nature appeared with the Big Bang. It's actually the other way round - the Big Bang was a natural process defined by the laws of nature. Science can only aim to explain the appearance of our universe using natural or scientific laws, so by definition, that would not be a miracle.
1.4 The wrong description
Finally the Apologist refers to Rupert Sheldrake's "Ten dogmas of Scientism". What Sheldrake actually wrote was the "Ten Dogmas of Modern Science." So it seems the Apologist would like scientism to be equivalent to science, but of course it isn't.
2 The Actual Definition of Scientism
What scientism actually means is the assumption that science can be the only source of knowledge, where all knowledge can be reduced to that which is measurable. This is obviously a bogus idea, as Karl Popper (among many others) pointed out.
The truth is that science provides models of reality based on theories that have been tested. Anything which, by its nature, cannot be tested or measured is obviously beyond science, and is "unfalsifiable".
2.1 Non-overlapping Magisteria
This is the view presented by Stephen Jay Gould that science and religion each represent different areas of inquiry, The two domains do not overlap.
So science should not, and cannot, be used to demonstrate that God does not exist, or that God exists, because God is unfalsifiable. Therefore, any argument about science on a religion db seems futile and pointless to me.
2.2 Can Faith and Science Coexist?
Of course, because they are complementary. They represent different areas of inquiry (see 2.2). Many scientists are also people of faith. A prime example is Francis Collins, a devout Christian who led the human genome project. In his book "The Language of God" he explains how and why he turned to faith, and his hypothesis of theistic evolution.
3 Sheldrake's Ten Dogmas of Modern Science
Sheldrake's ten points are listed below. I will ignore the misuse of the word "dogma" and treat each point individually:
1. Everything is mechanical; only mechanistic explanations will do.
2. Matter is unconscious / inanimate.
3. The matter and energy of the universe is constant, and has remained constant since the Big Bang.
4. The laws of nature are fixed.
5. Nature is without inherent purpose, and evolution has no goal.
6. Biological inheritance is a purely material process.
7. Minds are located within heads, and are nothing but the activities of brains.
8. Memories are stored in the brain, and are wiped out at death.
9. Telepathy and other psychic phenomena are illusory.
10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that works.
2) That seems to be the case at the atomic level, but not necessarily at the macroscopic level. Depends how you define matter and consciousness! Castigating science for not considering that “matter” might be “conscious” (whatever that means) is pointless what we have here is special pleading and false equivocation. If a pebble on the beach is conscious, it is not conscious in the same sense, or by the same definitions, as we intend when talking about human subjects as being conscious.
3) Incorrect. The total energy of our universe has yet to be defined as the volume is unknown (and could be infinite for all we know). Our universe is expanding and according to General Relativity the energy density stays roughly the same but the energy could be increasing. And mass has to be taken into account. The first law of thermodynamics doesn't actually specify that matter can neither be created nor destroyed as many Creationists like to assert - it actually says that the total amount of energy in a closed system cannot be created nor destroyed. It can however be changed from one form to another as mass and energy are essentially equivalent: E= mc^2
4) False. The laws of nature are defined by human beings and they have been revised and created many times and continue to be.
5) False. Nature is full of inherent purposes - too many to count! The process of evolution ensures the survival of a species by adaptation to their environment. Is that a goal? Not sure.
6) Not strictly true. There's an element of randomness and unpredictability in genetics (and biology in general) due to the nature of matter. So some inherited traits can be predicted with great accuracy, some not. And some traits will not be inherited at all.
7) Not true. Every organism has a mind of some sort but not every organism has a head or a brain.
8) This does appear to be the case. But it's impossible to know for sure.
9) False because telepathy is not a phenomenon. It has not been observed. Telepathy is a hypothesis used to explain certain phenomena.
10) I'm not sure what "mechanistic medicine" is. For example, the placebo effect works. Is that mechanistic? Psychology works - is that mechanistic?
No comments:
Post a Comment