Science has its own worldview that includes guiding presuppositions about the nature of the world. The founders of modern science expressed these very plainly for their time. Cosmic order (they said) flows wholly from God, so science redounds to his glory. When, however, God went out of fashion, new prophets - Comte, Marx, Freud, and the rest - crafted new and different background pictures, which were all supposed to be scientific. But these eventually became so confusing that Karl Popper exiled them all. Science was then deemed to consist only of falsifiable statements about the physical world......... Scientific psychology must (they said) deal exclusively with outside behavior. Consciousness, if it exists at all, is something trivial, unintelligible and ineffective ................................... it finally became clear that the behaviorists starvation diet cannot support intellectual life, so the taboo on mentioning consciousness in scientific circles has been lifted. Unfortunately, however, the visions by which people consoled themselves in their time of starvation - Jacques Monods dream of a cosmic casino run by natural selection and Richard Dawkinss drama of domination by selfish genes - are still with us, causing confusion. But our main trouble now is perhaps our ambivalent response to the idea of visions as such. We are still inclined to suspect that any talk except literal truths about the physical world is anti-scientific. Scientism thus emerged not as the conclusion of scientific argument but as a chosen element in a worldview ..... by Mary Midgley is a philosopher with a special interest in ethics, human nature, and science, and is the author of Evolution as a Religion and Science as Salvation. from templeton.org/belief/
Posted on: Sun, 08 Jun 2014 13:58:45 +0000
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