[ExI] Science or Scientism?

[BillK]

On Thu, 1 Nov 2018 at 19:37, Will Steinberg  wrote:
<snip>
>
> many, many people --including our past and present groundbreaking
> physicists, as well as modern neuroscientists--have learned enough
> about the universe to realize how perfectly dumb it is to make
> overarching claims about a universe we are nowhere close to
> understanding, from a conscious mind which we are even less
> close to understanding.
> _______________________________________________

Quote from -
<https://www.bigquestionsonline.com/2016/06/28/are-science-religion-conflict/>

In the case of science, the danger is that of scientism, the claim
that science provides a unique and privileged source of truth on all
matters. There are many reasons to resist this tendency. As
philosopher Ray Monk reminds us, there are many questions that do not
have scientific answers because they were not legitimate scientific
questions to begin with. Many of these questions concern the things
that are most important of all: faith, hope, love, truth, beauty, and
goodness — these do not lie in the territory of science. All of us —
including scientists — have an interest in resisting the barren
intellectual monoculture of scientism.

In conclusion, most people do not believe in an inherent conflict
between science and religion, and the historical evidence suggests
that they are correct. If we look beneath the surface when tensions do
arise, we typically find deep-seated conflicts between values that
have only tenuous connections to science and religion.
--------------------------

Quote from -
<https://www.aaas.org/programs/dialogue-science-ethics-and-religion/what-scientism>

Scientism, on the other hand, is a speculative worldview about the
ultimate reality of the universe and its meaning. Despite the fact
that there are millions of species on our planet, scientism focuses an
inordinate amount of its attention on human behavior and beliefs.
Rather than working within carefully constructed boundaries and
methodologies established by researchers, it broadly generalizes
entire fields of academic expertise and dismisses many of them as
inferior. With scientism, you will regularly hear explanations that
rely on words like “merely”, “only”, “simply”, or “nothing more than”.
Scientism restricts human inquiry.

It is one thing to celebrate science for its achievements and
remarkable ability to explain a wide variety of phenomena in the
natural world. But to claim there is nothing knowable outside the
scope of science would be similar to a successful fisherman saying
that whatever he can’t catch in his nets does not exist. Once you
accept that science is the only source of human knowledge, you have
adopted a philosophical position (scientism) that cannot be verified,
or falsified, by science itself. It is, in a word, unscientific.
--------------------------------

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio


BillK