tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post112870878662785937..comments2024-03-19T07:48:54.021-06:00Comments on Gus Van Horn: The Straw Man of ScientismGus Van Hornhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05126749051688217781noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-1129827747314517432005-10-20T11:02:00.000-06:002005-10-20T11:02:00.000-06:00Dr. Carson,Thanks for taking the time to reply.You...Dr. Carson,<BR/><BR/>Thanks for taking the time to reply.<BR/><BR/>You state: "The fundamental error you make, Gus, is that you think that science is what it should be instead of what it actually is, which is highly politicized and New Age. Try junkscience.com and study the issue carefully, and you'll have to conclude that what you think of as science is a mirage."<BR/><BR/>When you contend that I make the mistake of thinking that science as it is practiced today is what science should be, you are wrong. In fact, at the very outset, I say that the term "scientism" does in fact describe "The idea that science, here used in the common sense of 'natural science', can explain anything."<BR/><BR/>But I have to call "science as it should be" something, so I use the term "science". "Scientism" refers to the New-Agey stuff like that advocated by the neurobiologist <A HREF="http://gusvanhorn.blogspot.com/2005/01/book-review-end-of-faith-by-sam-harris.html" REL="nofollow">Sam Harris</A>. So that's what I did.<BR/><BR/>And as for visiting junkscience.com, my regular readers already know that I do so frequently. I am delighted to learn that you, personally, do not advocate Creationism. (I would feel even better if you were not an advocate of "Intelligent Design".) You will be happy to know that I regard global warming as a scientific controversy (and regard it as likely non-anthropgenic if it is happening at all), look at the various food additive scares with a jaundiced eye, and laugh out loud when I hear talk about power lines causing medical problems.<BR/><BR/>But I am an atheist, so I am supposed to believe these things, right? I must be a lousy atheist, then, for I am also very strongly pro-capitalist. And I think Stephen Hawking is a twit.<BR/><BR/>Bet that as it may, I said essentially nothing, in fact, about your scientific beliefs and they are largely immaterial to the discussion at hand. It is your political beliefs that I find disturbing.<BR/><BR/>To hit on the two most salient points again. <BR/><BR/>(1) After providing a litany of silly things about which the MSM tries to whip the general populace into hysterics, you then end -- by including on the list, "Civil libertarians warn of a police state when most of us see police officers only when driving past them as they ticket speeders. We go years, decades, with no contact with the police whatsoever.<BR/><BR/>One of the favorite worries of the professional worrying class is the establishment of religion."<BR/><BR/>Our Founding Fathers were concerned with each of these. Why are you, apparently, not?<BR/><BR/>(2) You state, "How else can we explain what otherwise appears to be a paranoid fear of an establishment of Christianity despite the near total lack of advocates of a state church?"<BR/><BR/>I addressed this at greatr length and will not rehash what I already stated other than to say that just because no one is explicitly calling for some Christian sect to become America's state religion, it doesn't mean that this is what the efforts of many in the Conservative movement will fail to produce if successful.<BR/><BR/>If you are not deliberately helping religionists turn America into a theocracy by helping them pretend that this is not what they are trying to do, then it sure looks like it to me. And if you don't know what I am speaking of, I recommend re-reading the section of my essay called, "State Religion: A Question of Whether, Not Which".<BR/><BR/>What makes America great? The fact that we are all free to hold our own beliefs and to express them without fear of persecution. The protection of this freedom is rooted in te prohibition of our government's sponsorship of any religion, Christian, Buddhist, New Age, or otherwise.<BR/><BR/>GusGus Van Hornhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05126749051688217781noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-1129479405084096022005-10-16T10:16:00.000-06:002005-10-16T10:16:00.000-06:00Thanks for going to so much trouble over my essay ...Thanks for going to so much trouble over my essay in The American Thinker.<BR/><BR/>Speaking of straw men, I see that I am accused of advocating the teaching of the literal Genesis account as science, of desiring an establishment of my own religion, and even of denying causality. Nothing I said remotely suggests such views, which are completely antithetical to my own.<BR/><BR/>The truth is that I carefully distingushed between science and scientism and criticized only the latter. <BR/><BR/>The fundamental error you make, Gus, is that you think that science is what it should be instead of what it actually is, which is highly politicized and New Age. Try junkscience.com and study the issue carefully, and you'll have to conclude that what you think of as science is a mirage.<BR/><BR/>Adrian Hester got it mostly right when he stated very well my objection to "social sciences." The problem goes deeper, however, because not only are the humanities trying to take advantage of the prestige of science, now the so-called sciences are claiming to be scientific, when they are increasingly the products of politics, megalomania, and New Age religion.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-1128909579649736582005-10-09T19:59:00.000-06:002005-10-09T19:59:00.000-06:00I thank both of you for stopping by!Thanks, Adrian...I thank both of you for stopping by!<BR/><BR/>Thanks, Adrian for making this valuable contribution. <BR/><BR/>In mulling this over, I considered what an "experiment" in my fallen empires example might entail and realized that free will would make any such attempt impossible, but didn't see exactly where to go with it. <BR/><BR/>GusGus Van Hornhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05126749051688217781noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-1128907653689579232005-10-09T19:27:00.000-06:002005-10-09T19:27:00.000-06:00Yo, Gus, you write: "We have already covered one ...Yo, Gus, you write: "We have already covered one example [against scientism]: Science, a discipline derived from the answers to certain philosophical questions is not able to address philosophical issues. But what of other branches of the humanities? History, for example, presents us with all manner of questions we simply cannot answer via the scientific method." It's beside your point, but since the humanities and the historical sciences are my bailiwick, I'll add a couple of comments.<BR/><BR/>First, you have a basic difference between experimental and historical sciences. Historical sciences are those like paleontology, evolutionary biology (not entirely historical), geology, and historical linguistics (which gets very close to the humanities), in which the methodology is to use our knowledge of the regularities of the world (known in part through the experimental sciences) to reconstruct the past in the light of historical evidence. The actual danger of scientism here is of misusing the results of the experimental sciences. You interpret the evidence about the past on the basis of the experimental sciences, but this evidence in turn is used to test and refine those interpretations (and thus indirectly to test the conclusions of the experimental sciences involved). In short, the actual problems you see are of experimental scientists unfamiliar with the evidence, methodology, and the various distinct lines of evidential reasoning in these fields drawing oversimplified conclusions that do violence to what is known about the past.<BR/><BR/>In history proper, what you must do just as much as in the historical sciences is reconstruct the past on the basis of the regularities we know about the subject--only here the most basic fact is that humans are rational beings with free will. This is what makes history a branch of the humanities and not one of the historical sciences. History must be based on several basic facts about human beings: Human action is motivated; people are rational beings; people can choose among competing means to accomplish their ends; in society human actions virtually always have unintended consequences. This is what must be assumed to be able to reconstruct historical events. Other sciences can <I>supplement</I> this (particularly economics, and if you're dealing with a foreign culture or an era that's fairly distant anthropology can be quite useful), but they can never <I>replace</I> it. The danger of scientism here is not from the hard or experimental sciences (scientistical types like Auguste Comte like to natter on about deterministic laws of society, differential equations describing social change, and so on, but that's just wishful thinking that few of them seriously attempt) but from the soft or social sciences when they adopt a view of man that ignores his nature as a rational being. (Of course, there's the secondary problem of scientism shared with the historical sciences of a failure to understand the intricacies of historical methodology, an impatience with dry and dusty philological or archival spadework, slighting the need to know as much as possible about the historical context which you can only get by a long immersion in the records of the period, an impatience with history as an interpretive study in which misplaced emphasis can be as misleading as wrong facts, and so on, but that's less dangerous to the field.)<BR/><BR/>Freudianism was one such model of humanity, but it never caught on very much among historians proper. Marxism was another such model, which was rather influential indeed among some historians (but it's probably the historians, and not just the economic historians, who earliest dismantled the empirical case for Marxism). I've run into some evolutionary psychology drudges who make the same broad claims for their fanaticism as the Freudians and Marxists did, and because they too reject free will and human rationality, they won't be any more successful in the long run than the Marxists (and probably not as successful as the Freudians) in making truly "scientific" history. (In a nutshell, history will not be revolutionized by those approaches because it is, along with anthropology, their ultimate empirical test.) Thus, on one view, the danger of scientism in history is not from the physical or experimental scientists but from the social sciences who reject the very basis of historical methodology. On the other hand, that threat is made possible by the physics envy of the scientistical types in the social sciences who view determinism (conflated with causality) as the basic model of all true science. <I>That</I> is the fundamental error of scientism. The trouble with the religious conservative argument you've discussed is not that it replaces determinism with causality, but that it dismisses causality.Adrian Hesterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13394227341130065130noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-1128883348086349352005-10-09T12:42:00.000-06:002005-10-09T12:42:00.000-06:00Great article. You should edit it down to submit i...Great article. You should edit it down to submit it to undercurrent. Really stressing your examples, conservatives can avoid getting an abortion but what they really want is to keep you from having the freedom, etc.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com