Has science saved us from wars, from age-old religious conflicts, from diseases and disasters? Science can’t fend off the barbarians at the gate any more than it can cure the common cold, and we barely lived through the bloodiest century in history as proof of its failures.īoth of these positions target the same foe, which I’ll call the hard position of science, or what is popularly called "scientism." The hard position is all or nothing: either science is the highest order discipline for uncovering the truth and showing the way to a better future, or nothing is. In some ways this view is even more critical of science than theism-it paints humankind as naïvely privileging one discipline above all others in an effort to save ourselves from the plainly inevitable. In this view, as with the first, humankind has replaced God with science, but since there never was a God to begin with, Science (capital “S”) is just as empty a figurehead as what it replaced. The other source is on the far side of the philosophical field from the first: postmodern-atheistic. This devotion to science isn’t just arrogant, it’s an affront to the almighty. Humanity was limited by its creator from the beginning, so what makes us think we can pretend to the throne with trite explanatory powers of science? We may as well be climbing the tower of Babel to shoot arrows at the sky. Our “faith” in science is a flimsy proxy for faith in higher power(s). In this view, science has become a false replacement for God.
The first, and most obvious, is theistic. This argument comes from two sources that are in most ways polar opposites. An argument that surfaces in the more heated of these chats is that science is an overvalued discipline-a secular deity defaulted to by those with a dangerously inflated view of humankind’s wherewithal. Since I write about science-related topics, I sometimes find myself in discussions about the role of science in finding “truth” (discussions that seem especially relevant as we enter an election season in which multiple candidates are openly antagonistic to science).
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