On Huston Smith: my son was assigned one of his books about science and religion in eleventh grade at his Catholic high school, and he brought it to me to discuss because he was both annoyed and perplexed by it. I have to say that I shared both emotions, in spades. On the evidence of this book I found Huston to be a shallow, casuistic, and in places downright dishonest thinker. Unfortunately I no longer have the book in question (my son handed it back to his teacher in disgust, the pages dense with angry annotations) so I can’t be ore specific.

“If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character, the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.” –*There Is No Natural Religion*, 1788

Or, more simply:

“What is now prov’d, was once only imagin’d.” –*The Marriage of Heaven and Hell*, 1790

Many working scientists today still have a very poor grasp of what scientific epistemology actually entails. They tend to be inductivists (Baconians) or predictivists (logical positivists, basically). Both these positions are philosophically naive, as critics from Bertrand Russell to Karl Popper have pointed out. I recommend David Deutsch’s excellent book *The Fabric of Reality* for more detail on this. When in dialogue with Deutsch about a dozen years ago in a listserv linked to his website, I said something to the effect that in physics, metaphor was just a prelude to getting to the math. Deutsch, a mathematical physicist (among other achievements, a founder of quantum computing) corrected me sharply, saying the the metaphor, the imaginative gestalt we have of a physical phenomenon, is actually more important than the math, which is really just the filling-in of the idea. This was also Einstein’s view.

I am forced to agree with Dave Belden’s point about the ethical responsibility of scientists with regard to the consequences of the implementation of their work in the form of technology. On the whole, though, I think engineers are guiltier in this regard than researchers or theorists, for obvious reasons. And behind so many of the bad or hasty implementations of technology have been two immense imperatives: political power and financial gain. In my view, the ultimate source of the problem is an economic system that places private (or bureaucratic) gain over the common welfare and which disempowers producers, whether of knowledge or material goods, from control over their products. This was and is as true of so-called “communism” (which I prefer to call state capitalism, since the wage-work relationship is maintained despite the formal change in ownership) as it is of corporate capitalism. These societies shape people as narrowly individualistic and perceptually and emotionally compartmentalized (see, for example, the studies of Robert Jay Lifton). There is no reason to expect scientists to be any more immune to these shaping pressures than the rest of us.

On a more hopeful note: in the context of the global environmental crisis, ecology and climate science are forcing scientists into an awareness not only of the immense social and political importance of their work but of the equally immense ethical responsibility they must now shoulder.

I will have more to say on the relationship of scientific epistemology to other ways of knowing in future posts.

I think you’re right, and when I said, “I think of scientism as the claim that the map of science is the territory of reality.” I was expressing a similar idea. All maps are metaphors: representation and simplification in a (hopefully) useful way of a more complex reality.

I was thinking of an atheist friend who at Solstice/Christmas/whatever wears a button that says “Axial Tilt: it’s the reason for the season”, as though that were more true than spiritual/ religious explanations. And of course those folks who say that as we know the world wasn’t created in six days, therefore all religion is false.

Thanks for the correction!

Great discussion.

I’m looking forward hugely to Sarah’s writing, not least because I also graduated from MIT (’70) where I first learned about spirituality from Huston Smith, who was teaching World Religions there at that time. (Alas, I was too late to take the course with Smith’s predecessor, Aldous Huxley.)

I’d argue that science is about that part of reality that is experimentally quantifiable; religion about that part that can only be spoken of as metaphor. There’s no overlap, (as Stephen Jay Gould wrote they are “nonoverlapping Magisteria”) and while there are invaluable truths in the world’s wisdom traditions, those traditions are maps of reality – not the territories themselves – and fundamentalists of all kinds (Hitchens and Dawkins included) don’t understand the difference.

I think of scientism as the claim that the map of science is the territory of reality: if it doesn’t show up as science, it isn’t real. (There go love, art, and literature….) And the greatest danger of scientism comes from those who are not “real” scientists (Will Nemorensis’ post on biopsychiatry outlines what those dangers in that specific field.)

And I’ll match your lovely opening quote from Lévi-Strauss, with one from Thomas Pynchon: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers”

It seems to me that the front line of attack against this view is the stand that ethical statements are a meaningful expression of an unavoidable human concern, even though they cannot be translated without remainder into empirically testable hypotheses. Scientific research may be able to demonstrate that global warming is real, that it is anthropogenic, and that, when all its consequences are considered, it is harmful for humans and other living species. But it cannot prove that we *should* do everything in our power to prevent that harm, or even that we *should* care.

Where does religion come into this? I think it comes in whenever people try to provide a rich narrative context for the “shoulds” or the values that guide our lives. These narratives can have empirically verifiable elements, as in Brian Swimme’s and Thomas Berry’s The Universe Story, but they cannot be solely governed by “the facts.”