Odious Darwinist Scientism. Why does it exist and how much does Intelligent Design help?
Intelligent Design and the Discovery Institute are a movement and a people who are helping Creationist scientists break down the Berlin Wall of Ignorance that Darwinism has erected, so rather than simply concentrate on differences between ID and Creation perhaps the piece below will help many of you understand naturalism and how it has birthed Scientism. There is a great divide between the empirical scientific method developed by Francis Bacon and the supposition-based systems used by the ruling scientific establishment.
For the Christian, science is a key to understanding how God made everything and what can be done to use that knowledge to make life better for people. We take the Bible as historically accurate and therefore as evidence. We apply that evidence to the evidence seen in the rocks and in organisms and in human history and we see that it all fits pretty neatly. There are very few sore thumbs sticking out of the Creationist worldview.
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| Francis Bacon, ca. 1622 |
Scientism is one of the curses of modern mankind. The artificial imposition of naturalism on the field of scientific inquiry is injurious to research and an insult to the intelligence of all men. Believe as you will but do not impose your belief system on science! To do so is to be as odious as Lysenko, as tiresome as Eugenie Scott the professional censor, as foolish as Richard Dawkins the bumbling Darwinist philosopher...Scientism is a giant speed bump on the superhighway of ideas, no, it is a toll gate on the superhighway of ideas seeking to stop some ideas from passing by. By what right do you naturalistic humanists impose your religion upon everyone else? You are exactly what the Founding Fathers of the USA sought to avoid and hoped to squash by founding a government which would be the land of the free and the home of the brave. Yet arrogant and impious Darwinist censors abound, requiring that propaganda be taught no matter what the evidence and seeking out those who disagree to censor and ban them from the world of science. We have a cowed scientific community and a brainwashed news media and in fact an entire generation, no, there have now been generations who have been fed fairy tales in place of science.
Socrates had a habit of asking difficult and annoying questions. He was eventually told to leave on his feet or feet-first. Plato made a record of the Dialogues of Socrates and wrote much material on his own, too, as well as passing on the torch to Aristotle. Much of what we attribute to the Greeks philosophically we owe to Socrates and Plato his student. Plato through his dialogues with Socrates did touch on the transcendent and there is a sense of his sensing an "ideal" or what I would call a divine or a supernatural aspect to existence.
Aristotle questioned and reasoned and poked and prodded into almost every area of learning. To some extent we give him credit for the scientific method of investigation, but his weakness was his methodology. He would decide what he thought was true, then set about to investigate in order to prove that his thesis was correct. Aristotle, like Socrates, asked one too many question and made one too many statements that were not favorable to the ruling paradigm and he, too, was asked to leave life a bit early. Now the ruling paradigm doesn't kill you, they just kill your career, so I suppose we have made a bit of progress there.
Too often, we refer to "the Greeks" and their mindset and in doing so miss the point that they were in fact of varied mindset and ideas. Greeks during their heyday certainly valued rational thought and discussion but they also valued fame and power and pleasure and quite often put morality at or near the bottom of the priority list. We could attribute hedonism to the Greeks just as easily as we could any virtue. "The Greeks" valued reason and found ways to investigate every facet of human behavior, amplify it and attribute it to one or more imaginary "gods", many of whom were simply ancestors converted into semi-deities by men who only half believed in them. They were the primary playwrights and authors of the Western world in their time.
Many philosophers have considered the supernatural world invisible to man to be a greater reality. Some are left grasping at the edges of understanding the Creator God. The difficulty of comprehending a supernatural world for the natural man was of great interest to Plato, and Socrates compared those who were satisfied with a materialistic view of the world as blind men living in a cave of evil and ignorance. They were men without muses, without a sense of a greater dimension to life. A pity that Paul the Apostle walked among the Greeks some 400 years too late for Socrates and Plato to hear the Gospel, which both men were discussing to some extent without a good knowledge of Hebrew scripture.
Aristotle decidedly came down on the side of Axiomatic study of the world, a view in which one proposed a hypothesis and held onto it doggedly until it was proven correct. His determination that the Universe was Geocentric ruled science until the findings of Galileo and Copernicus were finally accepted by the scientific community and the Church (Catholic Church). It was he that proposed the four elements of matter plus the aether of the Universe and it was he who was to some extent the father of individual scientific disciplines. Virtually everything Aristotle believed we now know to be wrong, but much of his findings were the beginning of further research and understanding. Aristotle provided the Western world a foundation for scientific discovery and considering the ability he had to investigate the world his findings were brilliant. Aristotle proposed a worldview that was groundbreaking in its fullness, even if faulty.
I do not deny that Socrates and Plato and Aristotle were not brilliant minds, men of action and vision, nor do I deny their rightful place in history in areas of philosophy and math and science. I would say, however, that it is time that the world move on and allow them their historical "props" while moving science on to the foundational methodology of Bacon instead. ID folks, as far as they go, tend to agree with Creationists on this point. Yes, another article for your enjoyment:
The problem with naturalism, the problem with empiricism
A review of Science’s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism by Cornelius Hunter
For all of history, the fundamental issue in the creation-evolution conflict has been philosophical presuppositions, not empirical evidence or ‘brute facts’. Creationists have been pointing this out for many years, with varying degrees of effectiveness. To their credit, the modern Intelligent Design movement has recognized this same point, and for almost twenty years now, has explicitly made philosophical argumentation central in the debate over Darwinism. Phillip Johnson played an important role in bringing the philosophy of naturalism out into the open and onto the dissecting table with his best-selling Darwin on Trial, the book usually credited with launching the modern ID movement. Distinctions between ‘methodological naturalism’ and ‘metaphysical naturalism’ became key points of debate. Biophysicist Cornelius Hunter has added to this understanding by authoring several books focused on the history of Darwinism and design. His latest work, Science’s Blind Spot, turns the tables completely on naturalism, this time in the realm of history, arguing that Darwinism is religious and ID is empirical. This thesis is not new in the ID literature, but Hunter’s way of saying it is.
To read the rest of the review, click here.