Is science the only way of knowing?

An economist friend of mine recently recommended Peter Boghassian's book Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. I had heard of the book, but my friends very high recommendations of it prompted me to order it. 

My friend and I had been discussing the issue of "critical thinking skills" and how much of the movement that has developed around this concept has been co-opted by postmodernist thinkers.

Since I had to wait for snail mail, I looked the book up at Oxford University Press. Obviously I can't adequately assess the book until I get it, but I notice that the summary at Oxford indicates that that his main line of argument is that postmodernists that postmodernists assume science is not the only way of knowing the world.

This chapter introduces a thesis that is enormously influential in the contemporary academy – Equal Validity: there are many radically different, mutually incompatible, yet ‘equally valid’ ways of knowing the world, with science being just one of them. It explains in a general way how constructivist views of knowledge might be thought to underwrite this thesis.

Boghassian presumably argues against this thesis. Of course, on this particular thesis, I would find myself on the side of the postmodernists. There are clearly other ways of knowing than science. Science could never have been developed if there weren't. 

I have addressed this issue a number of times, including here, here, and here.

Now this doesn't necessarily affect the usefulness of Boghassian's arguments against the postmodernists. In fact, this is the interesting thing about arguments between modernists (of which Boghassian is one) and postmodernists: They're both right in many of their critiques of each other. Modernists limit their toolbox to only one tool, and postmodernists seem to reject limits altogether. 

The holes in modernism's epistemological net exclude things that should not be excluded and the holes in postmodernism's net are so big they let too many things through.

It seems to me many scholars like Boghassian use the word "science" in the same way that they charge postmodernists use "knowledge" or even "thinking skills," that is to say, without clear definition.

If you define science narrowly--as that method by which the hard sciences come to their conclusions, then you exclude universally acknowledged forms of reasoning (such as those practiced by philosophers like Boghassian) that, of necessity, he must himself practice in his critique of postmodernism. And if you define it so broadly as to encompass rational inquiry in general, then to call it "scientific reasoning" is misleading, since it implies only that form of reasoning used in the hard sciences is valid.

In fact, asserting that "scientific reasoning is the only valid form of reasoning" is itself vulnerable to the argument against postmodernism Boghassian apparently uses in one of his chapters; namely, that the assertion is a performative contradiction: If the assertion "scientific reasoning is the only valid form of reasoning" is true, then scientific reason cannot be the only valid form of reasoning since there is no way to arrive at that conclusion using scientific reasoning (unless, again, your definition of scientific reasoning includes all forms of rational inquiry, which, again, is misleading).

In any case, I await the book.

Jürgen Habermas on scientism and analytic philosophy

I don't agree with Jürgen Habermas, one of our great cultural critics, on everything but he, along with a number of those associated with the "Frankfurt School" have a legitimate and useful critique of modern rationalistic scientism and instrumental rationality. In fact, is he the last surviving member of that crew?

The Frankfurt School was a group of influential early-twentieth century thinkers (my favorite of whom is Max Horkheimer--his Eclipse of Reason is a masterpiece) who were themselves influenced by Marx. And although Marx's prescription is fatally flawed, much of his diagnosis of modern commercial culture is right on the mark.

Here's Habermas critiquing the science-envy of the analytic philosophers in Eurozine:

The hard, scientistic core of the analytical philosophy was always alien to me. Today, it comprises colleagues who take up the reductionist Programme of the Unified Sciences from the first half of the twentieth century under somewhat different assumptions and more or less regard philosophy as a supplier for the cognitive sciences. The advocates of what we might call "scientism" ultimately view only statements of physics as capable of being either true or false and insist on the paradoxical demand of perceiving ourselves exclusively in descriptions of the natural sciences. But describing and recognizing oneself are not the same thing: decentring an illusionary self-understanding requires recognition on the basis of a different, improved description. Scientism renounces the self-reference required to be present in every case of re-cognition. At the same time, scientism itself utilizes this self-reference performatively – I mean the reference to us as socialized subjects capable of speech and action, and who always find themselves in the context of their lifeworlds. Scientism buys the supposed scientification of philosophy by renouncing the task of self-understanding, which philosophy has inherited from the great world religions, though with the intention of the enlightenment. By contrast, the intention of understanding ourselves exclusively from what we have learnt about the objective world leads to a reifying description of something in the world that denies the self-referential application for the purpose of improving our "self"-understanding.

HT: 3 Quarks Daily

The founding myth of scientism and why it's wrong

In philosopher Stephen Toulmin's book Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, he discusses what he calls the "Received View" or the "Standard Account" of Modernity. It is the one we are familiar with that holds that until the Englightenment, the world was in intellectual darkness, brought on by religious thought, until the onset of science. Toulmin, most famous for the "Toulmin Method" of analyzing a rhetorical argument, points out that it has little basis in reality.

The idea that 17th century thinkers somehow developed an "original concern for rationality and the claims of Reason," says Toulmin, is "misleading":

Rather than expanding the scope for rational or reasonable debate, 17th century scientists narrowed it. To Aristotle, both Theory and Practice were open to rational analysis, in ways that differed from one field of study to another. He recognized that the kinds of argument relevant to different issues depend on the nature of those issues, and differ in degrees of formality or certainty: what is "reasonable" in clinical medicine is judged in different terms from what is "logical" in geometrical theory. Seventeenth-century philosophers and scientists, by contrast, followed the example of Plato. They limited "rationality" to theoretical arguments that achieve a quasi-geometrical certainty or necessity: for them, theoretical physics was thus a field for rational study and debate, in a way that ethics and law were not. Instead of pursuing a concern with "reasonable" procedures of all kinds, Descartes and his successors hoped eventually to bring all subjects into the ambit of some formal theory: as a result, being impressed only by formally valid demonstrations, they ended by changing the very language of Reason—notably, key words like "reason," "rational," and "rationality"—in subtle but influential ways. 

We could add, as another methodological fallacy introduced by the rise of scientific materialism, the idea, not only that rationality encompasses only the formally valid, but that it includes only the empirically verifiable (the tradition that comes from Bacon, as opposed to Descartes). And of course the irony here is that the idea of strict formal demonstration and empirical verifiability are largely conflicting methodologies.

To say the the 17th century was a time in which Reason was freed from the shackles of Medieval superstition is one of the founding myths of scientism. "Clearly," says Toulmin, "it is time to give up any assumption that the 17th century was a time--the first time—when lay scholars in Europe were prosperous, comfortable, and free enough from ecclesiastical pressure to have original ideas; and it is also time to reconstruct our account of the transition from the medieval to the modern world on a more realistic basis."

For anyone to call the Middle Ages—the age of Peter Abelard, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus—is to betray a basic ignorance of medieval history and thought. In fact, the Middle Ages was perhaps the great age of logic. Alfred North Whitehead goes so far as to say that the revolt of Galileo was far from a revolt into reason. "On the contrary," says Whitehead, "it was through and through an anti-intellectualist movement."

The Middle Ages, Says Whitehead, "was the age of faith based upon reason. In the later period, they let sleeping dogs lie: it was the age of reason based upon faith."

Thomas Nagel says more things that will make the champions of Scientism mad

Thomas Nagel's book Mind and Cosmos has to have been one of the most hated books of recent years--hated, that is, by those who get red-faced every time someone challenges the dominant Religion of Science. Nagel, one of the great philosophers of the 20th century (and the first part of the 21st) takes the time, in the Times (NY) to restate his simple argument. I don't agree with his final conclusion, but his demarcation of the issues is mostly correct:

This is a brief statement of positions defended more fully in my book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, which was published by Oxford University Press last year. Since then the book has attracted a good deal of critical attention, which is not surprising, given the entrenchment of the world view that it attacks. It seemed useful to offer a short summary of the central argument ...

Read the rest here.

The Folly of Scientism

My friend Mike Janocik pointed me to this article in the New Atlantis on scientism:

When I decided on a scientific career, one of the things that appealed to me about science was the modesty of its practitioners. The typical scientist seemed to be a person who knew one small corner of the natural world and knew it very well, better than most other human beings living and better even than most who had ever lived. But outside of their circumscribed areas of expertise, scientists would hesitate to express an authoritative opinion. This attitude was attractive precisely because it stood in sharp contrast to the arrogance of the philosophers of the positivist tradition, who claimed for science and its practitioners a broad authority with which many practicing scientists themselves were uncomfortable.  

The temptation to overreach, however, seems increasingly indulged today in discussions about science. Both in the work of professional philosophers and in popular writings by natural scientists, it is frequently claimed that natural science does or soon will constitute the entire domain of truth. And this attitude is becoming more widespread among scientists themselves. All too many of my contemporaries in science have accepted without question the hype that suggests that an advanced degree in some area of natural science confers the ability to pontificate wisely on any and all subjects. 

 Read the rest here.

Breaking News: Parrot imitates human speech

Not really. Actually, it was a beluga whale, according to atheist biologist Jerry Coyne. And this is supposed to be further evidence of how highly intelligent whales are and more cause for thinking that we shouldn't keep them in captivity.

I can't remember anyone arguing that parrots should be set free because they can imitate human speech. [queue up Lynard Skynard's "Free Bird" here] In fact, if anything, the ability to talk would be a reason to keep a bird rather than to free it.

But it is obligatory for scientific materialists like Coyne to take note of any instance in which an animal does anything remotely like a human, however unenlightening and uninformative it might be, since they think it bolsters atheist dogma that humans are not essentially different from brute animals.

Repeat after me: "It doesn't prove anything."

Larry Moran and philosophy envy

If you want to see what passes for intellectual rigor among atheists, all you need do is check out the blogs of Jerry Coyne and Laurence Moran--particularly when they try to take on certain humanities disciplines like philosophy, disciplines in which they not only have no expertise, but which they appear to know little about even from the outside. It is a deficiency they try to make up for by mischaracterizing positions they disagree with and, well, just making stuff up.

It just grates on them that there are other methods and modes of inquiry out there other than the purely scientific. There are humanities disciplines out there like philosophy, which just cannot be allowed to exist as legitimate and distinct academic disciplines. The answer? Just proclaim (with no evidence whatsoever, despite the fact that they talk a lot about evidence) that the questions that have traditionally been part of the province of philosophy are amenable to scientific investigation.

Coyne and Moran are both professors of biology, Coyne at the University of Chicago, and Moran at the University of Toronto. They're mad as Hell that humanities scholars are criticizing their naive views about what are properly theological and philosophical questions and they're not going to take it anymore.

Their chief strategy in defending themselves against charges of philosophical naivete seems to be to emphasize just how naive they are.

I'll deal with Coyne later, but Moran is on something of a roll over the last couple of weeks, producing a series of posts in which he demonstrates just how out of his depth he is.

In a post responding to a graduate student who wrote an article in Scientific American defending the humanities, he declares:

Science is a way of knowing that is evidence based and requires rational thinking and healthy skepticism. It's the only successful way of knowing that has ever been invented.

The statement is either too specific to be true or too broad to be meaningful. If he means that there is a form of reasoning unique to the natural sciences or that originated with the natural sciences, then the claim is just plainly false. If he merely means a method of academic inquiry that reflects the three specific criteria he mentions, then the claim is utterly without force, since these criteria are common to most if not all academic disciplines.

In fact, ten bucks says Moran can't name a single traditional academic discipline that a) doesn't appeal to evidence of some kind, b) doesn't employ any kind of rational inquiry in some form, or c) doesn't at least have some minimal level of critical standards that distinguish between the acceptable and unacceptable (and fake academic disciplines like "women's and gender studies" don't count) Their practitioners may employ these standards well or badly, but they are their standards nonetheless.

There may be epistemological procedures unique to the natural sciences; in fact, there most certainly are, but they are not of the broad kind that Moran includes in this absurd declaration. Nor did any of his criteria for scientific reasoning originate with the natural sciences. All of them originated in philosophy--just one respect in which science is dependent on that discipline. The philosopher Francis Bacon was one of the first champions of induction, followed by later philosophers who assisted in honing it, like John Stuart Mill. American philosopher C. S. Pierce pioneered the study of abduction (which, more so than induction, is what seems to drive the process of scientific discovery). There are many, many others.

Moran also seems oblivious to the fact that science didn't even exist as a distinct discipline until around the turn of the 20th century. What did it call itself before that? Natural philosophy. In fact Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Darwin all thought of themselves as natural philosophers. Science itself was birthed in philosophy and continues to receive corrective criticism from it from the likes of Karl Popper (who, temporarily forgetting their animus toward philosophers, scientists are constantly appealing to as the arbiter of where science begins and ends), Thomas Kuhn (primarily a sociologist), and other philosophers of science.

Moran's claim is more than false; it's silly. There was really no successful way of knowing before the onset of science as we know it in the 17th and 18th centuries? Really?

A far better definition of science would be something like this: "Science is an activity that consists in the explanation, prediction, and control of empirical phenomena in a rational manner. By 'scientific reasoning' we mean the principles of reasoning relevant to the pursuit of this activity. They include principles governing experimental design, hypothesis testing, and the interpretation of data." Even here there are problems, like whether science actually explains things or whether it merely or describes and predicts them. But it's a whole lot more meaningful than Moran's.

Moran asks three questions at the end of his recent post:

1. "Has philosophy, by itself, solved any of these problems (the existence of God, morality and ethics, mind and body, and epistemology)?" The short answer is, "Yes." But what Moran really means, as is evident in other posts, is "Are any of the proffered solutions that are non-controversial?" The answer to that is, of course, "No." But that proves nothing. Can we criticize science in the same way? Has science solved the problem of gravity? What exactly is "dark matter"? How do gravity and the strong nuclear force work together, and what explains them both? Is there a unified field theory that is fully accepted by all scientists? And what's the deal with the relativity and quantum theory? These are theories that deal with the fundamental elements of the reality: space, time, and mass. Why don't they agree?

Scientists who live in glass houses ...

2. "What kind of true knowledge [sic] has philosophy discovered?" I answered this in the comments section of Moran's blog. So far, no word from Larry. Here's what I said: "The Law of Identity, the Law of Excluded Middle, the Law of Non-Contradiction, the existence and distinction between univocal, equivocal, and analogous terms, the distinction between contradictory, contrary, subcontrary and subalternate statements, and the rules for logical validity. And that's just one branch of philosophy.

3. Can anyone give us an example that will cause us to consider philosophy as another way of knowing? Yes. Plato's dialogues in which he employs the methodology of dialectic.

Moran scoffs at the whole idea that there is even such a thing as scientism, even as he engages in it with impunity. Moran says science is even fit to deal with "questions about the supernatural." As C. S. Lewis once asked, how can a discipline whose domain is the natural say anything about what is beyond nature? Science has no more business delving into religion than a shoe salesman has flying an airplane.

Here's the definition of scientism, given by John Wellmuth, a philosopher, in 1944: "the belief that science, in teh modern sense of that term, and the scientific method as described by modern scientists, afford the only reliable natural means of acquiring such knowledge as may be available about whatever is real." If that's not Moran's position, then he's doing a pretty good job making it look like it is.

Now that we've answer Moran's questions, let's ask him one:

If science can address questions outside the empirical, such as religious questions, what scientific experiment could confirm or disconfirm the existence of God? If you think you can, then aren't you assuming the existence of God is falsifiable? And if it is, then aren't you committing yourself to the position (if Popper, the scientist's favorite philosopher is right) that religion (or at least philosophical theology) is within the bounds of science? And if that is the case, then can we teach it in schools now?

The Flying Spaghetti Multiverse: So what was that about science being falsifiable?

I have commented before on this blog about the argument used by Darwinists that Intelligent Design is false because it is not falsifiable--an argument that surely wins the prize for brazen ridiculousness.

I don't have a position on ID per se, other than to question whether, as philosophers like Ed Feser point out, it doesn't operate within the same modern mechanistic paradigm as does Darwinism. Creationism too, whatever its other, scientific challenges, seems to have this same philosophical problem.

But it is not only the low standards of argumentation employed against non-Darwinian explanations of origins that are remarkable, but the willingness of modern scientism to employ completely different standards of what constitutes science, as it suits their fancy.

Physicist Brian Greene has just written an article for Newsweek magazine on Multiverse theory. This is the idea that some of what we know of our present universe us unexplainable without postulating that there are other, parallel universes.

Now we have all heard of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the creation of critics of creationism and Intelligent Design used to underscore their argument that these scientifically heretical views are the unscientific products of the overly-credulous. The Flying Spaghetti Monster is used as an analog for religion. Like the God of religion, say the New Atheists who invented him, the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe (when none of us were around to see it; he helps those who believe in him to explain the universe as they see it; but his existence cannot be verified. There is literally no way to prove his existence (or to disprove it).

But the New Atheists all of a sudden have a brain lapse when theories of their own suffer from the same problem. Not only do they not apply the falsifiability standard to their own beliefs, they go so far (as Lawrence Krauss does in his A Universe from Nothing) to champion such unverifiable beliefs.

Multiverse theory (or string theory for that matter) displays the same characteristics of the Flying Spaghetti Monster: It is used to explain the origin of the universe and its current state, and it is entirely unverifiable. And, like the adherents to "Pastafarianism" (the name of Flying Spaghetti Monster religion) scientists averse to a belief in God find it a great comfort to believe in him.

As far as I know, these facts are not even in dispute. Every scientist I have ever read who comments on it admits this. There is not only no way to verify it; there is not even any conceivable way of verifying it.

Behold the Flying Spaghetti Multiverse. Bow the knee, ye credulous scientistic people.

Lawrence Krauss: The new poster child for scientism

We hereby declare this week "Lawrence Krauss Week" here at Vital Remnants. Krauss is fast becoming the poster boy for modern New Atheist scientism by engaging in an adolescent triumphalism about science that is now making even some of his atheist colleagues uncomfortable.


I mean, when you force Jerry Coyne to distance himself from you, you know your becoming radioactive. It would be sort of like having Jerry Springer disassociate from you on grounds of bad journalism.


Krauss, for those of our readers unfamiliar with the more exotic specimens of scientism, is a physicist at Case Western Reserve whose new book, A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing (which we will be reviewing later this week), marks a new low in a New Atheist literature characterized by not being very high.


Krauss' most recent flight from rationality occurred in a recent interview with The Atlantic, in which he goes after the discipline of philosophy. At least the old atheists knew better than to dismiss a whole field of study simply because they didn't understand it.


Here is Krauss, from the Atlantic interview, displaying his utter lack of understanding of what he is criticizing:

Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, "those that can't do, teach, and those that can't teach, teach gym." And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. It has no impact on physics what so ever, and I doubt that other philosophers read it because it's fairly technical. And so it's really hard to understand what justifies it. And so I'd say that this tension occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn't.

Boneheaded Statement #1: The "only people who read philosophy of science" are "philosophers of science"? First of all that's a completely inaccurate statement. I happen to have on my mp3 player at this very moment two series of lectures published by the Great Courses on the subject. Not only am I not a philosopher of science, but the company that produces them makes money from people buying them, and I cannot imagine that there are enough philosophers of science out there to constitute a market if that is the only people purchasing them.


But why should it matter? Maybe Krauss could inform the public who else besides particle physicists read the complicated journal articles that appear in physics journals in that particularly specialty. How many do you think are cosmologists? If the legitimacy of a specialty in a discipline is going to be judged by how many people outside that specialty read in it, then what is fate of cosmology?


Boneheaded Statement #2: "It has no impact on physics what so ever, and I doubt that other philosophers read it because it's fairly technical. And so it's really hard to understand what justifies it." Huh?  Is this even an argument? Why does philosophy of science have to have an "impact on physics"? And how would having an "impact on science" justify the philosophy of science? The point of the philosophy of science is not to have an "impact on physics" in the first place. It's supposed to offer a rational critique of science. If no scientist wants to listen (in fact, many of them do), then that's not the problem of the philosophy of science; it's problem with science.


Boneheaded Statement #3: "And so I'd say that this tension occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn't." What evidence does he have that people in the philosophy of science are threatened? How does he know what their motives are?  Why shouldn't we believe instead that he feels threatened by the philosophy of science? And in what way has the philosophy of science not progressed? Does he really think there is not a greater understanding the what criteria should and shouldn't be employed in demarcating science from non-science today than 100 years ago? Or about the way science explains? Or about causality? Or about probability? Has he never heard of Leibniz? Berkely? Hume? Bayes? Whewell? C. S. Pierce? Bertrand Russell? Rudolf Carnap? Kurt Gödel? Karl Popper? Thomas Kuhn? Karl Hempel? Nelson Goodman? Ernest Nagel? Saul Kripke? Paul Feyerabend? Bas van Fraasen? Have these people really have made no contribution to any progress in the understanding of science--what it is, how it explains, and how it justifies itself?


This is just one paragraph folks, and it doesn't get any better. If Krauss isn't careful, he's going to give intellectual incompetence a bad name.

An update from the Church of Atheism

More evidence for my thesis that atheism is a Christian heresy, this time from Stanley Fish in the New York Times, discussing an interview of Richard Dawkins and Stephen Pinker by Chris Hayes on MSNBC :

Pushed by Hayes, who had observed that when we accept the conclusions of scientific investigation we necessarily do so on trust (how many of us have done or could replicate the experiments?) and are thus not so different from religious believers, Dawkins and Pinker asserted that the trust we place in scientific researchers, as opposed to religious pronouncements, has been earned by their record of achievement and by the public rigor of their procedures. In short, our trust is justified, theirs is blind. 

It was at this point that Dawkins said something amazing, although neither he nor anyone else picked up on it. He said: in the arena of science you can invoke Professor So-and-So’s study published in 2008, “you can actually cite chapter and verse.” 

With this proverbial phrase, Dawkins unwittingly (I assume) attached himself to the centuries-old practice of citing biblical verses in support of a position on any number of matters, including, but not limited to, diet, animal husbandry, agricultural policy, family governance, political governance, commercial activities and the conduct of war. Intellectual responsibility for such matters has passed in the modern era from the Bible to academic departments bearing the names of my enumerated topics. We still cite chapter and verse — we still operate on trust — but the scripture has changed (at least in this country) and is now identified with the most up-to-date research conducted by credentialed and secular investigators.

Read the rest here.

Can science explain how something came from nothing?

One of the dogmas of the New Atheism is that science is superior to philosophy and theology as a means to truth--in every way, on every question. The trouble is, every time its exponents make a pronouncement based on this assumption, they get schooled by some philosopher or theologian on whatever non-scientific issue they have waded into, thinking that the only thing they needed was their science.

Just check out the exchanges between New Atheist biologist Jerry Coyne and Catholic philosopher Ed Feser if you want a good example.

Now we have New Atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss, whose new book A Universe from Nothing purports to explain how something came from nothing (as he defines it). My review of the book will be up this week, but in the meantime, there is philosopher David Albert's takedown of Krauss' book in the New York Times, which he summarizes as "the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb."

Of course the issue of where scientific explanation begins and ends is not, as scientists like Krauss seem to believe, a question in the field of science, but, ironically, in the field of philosophy, philosophy of science in particular. Albert points out one of the central flaws of Krauss's entire position:

It happens that ever since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, what physics has given us in the way of candidates for the fundamental laws of nature have as a general rule simply taken it for granted that there is, at the bottom of everything, some basic, elementary, eternally persisting, concrete, physical stuff. Newton, for example, took that elementary stuff to consist of material particles. And physicists at the end of the 19th century took that elementary stuff to consist of both material particles and electro­magnetic fields. And so on. And what the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all there is for the fundamental laws of nature to be about, insofar as physics has ever been able to imagine, is how that elementary stuff is arranged. The fundamental laws of nature generally take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of that stuff are physically possible and which aren’t, or rules connecting the arrangements of that elementary stuff at later times to its arrangement at earlier times, or something like that. But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all.

...The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” — the laws of relativistic quantum field theories — are no exception to this ...and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.

But it's not like Krauss or any of the other New Atheists are actually going to pay any attention to the fact that their field of expertise has nothing to do with the questions they think they can use it to address. That would be an admission that the scientism they champion is completely bogus.

He also points out one of the central problems of the book, which is Krauss' definition of "nothing," which, it turns out, happens to be something, namely vacuum states:

But that’s just not right. Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-­theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields! ... And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.

The book is, indeed, a mess, which, of course, didn't stop fellow New Atheist Richard Dawkins from hailing the book. Read the rest here.

Another New Atheist setting his hair on fire

The 19th century mathematician and historian of philosophy Augustus DeMorgan once issued a warning for the scientist who tried to venture into metaphysics: "[W]hen he tries to look down his own throat with a candle in his hand," he said, he needs to "take care that he does not set his head on fire."

Despite the warning, scientists have been setting their hair on fire ever since. And with the onset of the New Atheists, the need for philosophical fire extinguishers has grown exponentially.

The result has been scientists who, rather than assent to the existence of God, will believe in almost anything. One example is multiple universes, recently proposed by, among others, physicist Stephen Hawking. The belief in this, we are told with a straight face, is more rational than believing in God.

This is not a new idea, of course, having already been thought up--and rejected--by the Greeks.

Another more recent example is Jerry Coyne, a biologist who regularly practices philosophy without a license. He wrote an opinion piece for USA Today a month or so back wherein he announced to the world that free will was an illusion. Coyne's intellectual gears too are stuck in an earlier time, in his case, the early 20th century positivistic materialism that most philosophers themselves--including most of those who came up with the idea in the first place--abandoned back about the 1960s.

But Jerry still hasn't gotten the memo.

In his new post, he wrestle's with the only other theory of free will more absurd than is own materialistic one, namely compatiabalism--the idea that determinism and free will are consistent with one another. Coyne at least realizes that won't fly, but then, seeing that the only other alternative is to go outside his little materialistic world, he bites the bullet and denies free will.

At least we can credit Coyne with being consistently wrong.

Scientism? What Scientism? We haven't seen any scientism...

The New Atheists are currently in the throes of denial that their beliefs about religion and philosophy smack of "scientism." And if you can't answer a charge, what better thing to do than to confuse the issue?

The term "scientism" has been around since the late 19th century, but was known as a concept even in ancient times, and it has been applied frequently to the reductive mode of thought that sees all problems as reducible to strictly scientific problems. It's the "when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem many atheists have who are blind to their own scientifically unverifiable assumptions as well as the whole range of legitimate beliefs that are immune to scientific testability.

The two main responses of New Atheists like Jerry Coyne and Jason Rosenhouse, two scientific bulls who frequently wander into the philosophical china shop, are that a) their beliefs do not meet the criteria of scientism, and b) there are no such things as criteria for scientism anyway. It's kind of hard to hold both these mutually exclusive positions simultaneously, but it is a feat Jerry and Jason attempt in almost every post they write on the subject.

The fact that you can't just take the methodologies and conventions of one body of knowledge and indiscriminately apply them in other intellectual disciplines was understood as early as the 4th century B.C. In Book I, ch. 3 of his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle asserts that it is the "mark of an educated man" that not every discipline admits of the same level of precision and that "precision ought not to be sought in the same way in all kinds of discourse."

In other words, you can't verify that, say, Caesar crossed the Rubicon with the same level of precision as you can determine the paternity of a child (at least today)--and you can't use the same methods to determine the former as the latter--and vice-versa.

To use a technical term: Duh.

It's a simple concept, really, but Coyne and Rosenhouse just doesn't seem to get it. So, first, they feign ignorance. Says Rosenhouse:

But I've never entirely understood what scientism actually is. The usual definition is that scientism is the blinkered belief that science is the only reliable “way of knowing,” but this is vague until we have sharp definitions of “science” and “way of knowing.”

And then there are those pesky terms "the" and "only". What do they mean? Are New Atheist scientists really so philosophically challenged that they can't understand a term that has been around in fairly common discourse in the scholarly community for at least 60 years?

Just pulling down a few random books from my office library shelves, I find very quickly this definition given by John Wellmuth, S.J., in the 1944 Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University. "The Nature and Origin of Scientism":

The word "scientism," as used in this lecture, is to be understood as meaning the belief that science, in the modern sense of that term, and the scientific method as described by modern scientists, afford the only reliable natural means of acquiring such knowledge as may be available about whatever is real. (pp. 1-2)

He not only defines it, he describes it and lists its three chief characteristics:

1. "the fields of the various sciences ... are taken to be coextensive, at least in principle, with the entire field of available knowledge"
2. "the scientific method ... is the only reliable method of widening and deepening our knowledge and of making that knowledge more accurate"
3. "either that philosophy should be made scientific by conforming to the methods and ideas of some particular science, or that the function of philosophy is to correlate and if possible unify the findings of the other sciences by means of generalizing on a basis of these findings, after ridding itself of outworn metaphysical notions."

I find basically the same definition in F. A. Hayek's The Counter-Revolution of Science, where he describes it as:

the mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed ... a very prejudiced approach which, before it has considered its subject, claims to know what it he most appropriate way of investigating it. (p. 24)

"Such an attitude," Hayek quotes physicist P. W. Bridgman as saying, "bespeaks an unimaginativeness, a mental obtuseness and obstinacy, which might be expected to have exhausted their pragmatic justification at a lower plane of mental activity." (The Logic of Modern Physics, 1928, p. 46).

Then I grab for a third book: Life is a Miracle, by Wendell Berry, who discusses how "this legitimate faith in scientific methodology seems to veer off into a kind of religious faith in the power of science to know all things and solve all problems, whereupon the scientist may become an evangelist and go forth to save the world." (p. 19)

There you have it: a philosopher, an economics, a scientist, and a novelist, poet, and essayist, over a 60 year period, all of whom have no trouble negotiating the term "scientism." But Jerry Coyne and Jason Rosenhouse just don't get it.

Maybe it's that narrow scientific training they got. Doesn't seem to transfer over too well into all those other disciplines that are supposed to bend the knee to science, does it?

If there is a problem with this definition, then what is it? There are four basic criteria for a good definition:

1. that it have both a generic and differentiating element
2. that the definition and the thing defined be coextensive
3. that the definition be clearer than what is defined
4. that the definition be universal (and not individual: you can't define 'Obama', but you can define 'president')

You can find these in ch. 10 of my Material Logic. Wellmuth's definition (and the others) meet all four criteria. So what's the problem? The problem is that the question of what the limits of science are is not a scientific question, but you are arguing with people who think every question is a scientific question, including the question "What is a scientific question?"

The definition of "scientism" is essentially a philosophical endeavor, a kind of question in which Coyne and Rosenhouse have no formal expertise, much less any demonstrated informal facility, and what makes it worse is that they don't seem have a clue that they're insufficient to the task. It's somewhat analogous to a literature professor trying his hand at physics and wondering what all this stuff about time and space really means after all.

To Coyne and Rosenhouse it's all just a religionist plot concocted to cover their own intellectual illegitimacy: "The relevant distinction between scientific knowledge claims and religious knowledge claims is that the former are based on reliable methods while the latter are not." Reliable meaning "scientific." By definition, of course.

The answer? "We should reject totally," says Rosenhouse, "the idea that there are two kinds of knowledge, scientific on the one hand and religious on the other." I would pass this off as merely an attempt by someone trained only in the use of a hammer to redefine everything as a nail, but it is even more strange than that.

Instead of erasing the line between science and religion such that science engulfs religion, instead Coyne and Rosenhouse, in erasing the line between the two, end up only with ... religion. Their religion. It is the religion of science--or, as we said before, scientism. It is, said Berry, "the religification ... of science." The scientist is no longer the dull gray figure putzing around the lab. No. He must be seen in a more heroic role. The scientist now, says Berry, occupies the "place once occupied by the prophets and priests of religion."

But the argument that Coyne and Rosenhouse think is the most telling argument proving that they are not, in fact, guilty of scientism is the very clever procedure of engaging in it in the very process of denying it.

After arguing that this whole "scientism" thing is just a religionist plot (he would say "creationist" plot except the BioLogos people have been using the term), Rosenhouse waxes scientistic in the very process of denying the existence of scientism:

So I don't think it is unreasonable, in the context of these sorts of discussions, to define science very broadly. It just seems silly to me to say that scientific knowledge is one kind of thing, historical knowledge is something else, philosophical knowledge is a third and mathematical knowledge is a fourth. Mathematicians primarily use deductive reasoning in their work, but deductive reasoning is not some special, mathematical approach to knowledge that is separate from what scientists do. The primary tool of philosophy is dialectical argumentation, but this, too, is not something that is foreign to scientific practice.

In other words, how can there be such a thing as scientism (which is the belief that science is the only legitimate mode of intellectual inquiry) when, in fact, we know that science is the only legitimate mode of intellectual inquiry?

We know that everything is, in fact, a nail because, as you can plainly see, all we've got here hammer. QEP (Quod est procusum. Rough translation: "That which was to be proven hammered").

It's nonsense like this that contributes to people like Massimo Pigliucci, an atheist scientist who is at least capable of making a competent rational case for his beliefs, charging people like Coyne with "hero worship and a selective dearth of critical thinking."