A rchive Date
[ 12-09-2005 ]
Category
[ Philosophy ]
sub-Categoy
[ Scientism ]
|
[http://www.keithchandler.com/Essays/%22Shamans%22_of_Scientism.html
Comments on Michael Shermer's "The Shamans of Scientism"
Keith Chandler
This article appeared on the “Skeptics“ page, 35, of the June 2002 edition of Scientific American. The page is Michael Shermer's personal production and for some time now has been a standard feature of the magazine. It is as its name indicates an ideologically based polemic in the tradition of CSISCOP and such publications as The Skeptical Inquirer.
Shermer is not without academic credentials. According to his own Website, www.skeptic.com, he “received his B. A. in psychology from Pepperdine University, M. A. in experimental psychology from California State University, Fullerton, and his Ph. D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate School.“ He has been busy ever since. According to the same source, “Since his creation of the Skeptics Society, Skeptic magazine, and the Skeptics Lecture Series at Caltech, he has appeared on such shows as 20/20, Dateline, Good Morning America, Extra!, Charlie Rose, Tom Snyder, Donahue, Oprah, Sally, Lezza, Unsolved Mysteries, and other shows as a skeptic of weird and extraordinary claims, as well as on documentaries aired on A&E, Discovery, and The Learning Channel.“ With the possible exception of the The Learning Channel, appearances on none of these shows bears on Shermer's credibility since they all give equal if not more time to the people who make the weird and extraordinary claims he disputes. It's show business, after all. Oh yes, Dr. Shermer is also a cyclist and an expert on cycling but there is no "Cyclist" page in Scientific American.
I personally do not care if Shermer has a Ph.D. or a seventh-grade education. As a matter of principle, my only interest is in whether what he writes makes good sense or doesn't. The essence of this particular article is contained in a large orange rubric insertion in the middle of the text:
This being the Age of Science, it is scientism's shamans who command our veneration.
From this statement, it is clear that science and "scientism" are not the same. According to Shermer, scientism is a “scientific worldview that encompasses natural explanations for all phenomena, eschews supernatural and paranormal speculations, and embraces empiricism and reason as the twin pillars of a philosophy of life appropriate for an Age of Science.“ He cites as epitomes of scientism “Carl Sagan, E. O. Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins and Jared Diamon.“ Shermer seems to take Stephen Hawking as the quintessential paragon of scientism. In referring to a lecture by Hawking at Caltech, he begins his essay with a “grabber“: “In 1998 God appeared at Caltech,“ the metaphoric “God“ being Hawking. However, when Hawking was asked what Shermer considers the “ultimately unanswerable question,“ the Venerable One replied, “I do not answer God questions.“ It is noteworthy, on the other hand, that while he declined to answer God questions at Caltech Hawking devoted quite a bit of space in A Brief History of Time to raising them. I will address some of his comments later because he really does pose some of the right questions quite lucidly.
Shermer's unapologetic reverence for the term “scientism“ surprised me because I had generally only heard it used and used it myself to refer to the archaic materialist or physical realist ideology entertained by many scientists and philosophers. That ideology is, of course, is precisely what Shermer is championing. It has been characterized by The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences as follows:
Unlike the use of the scientific method as only one mode of reaching knowledge, scientism claims that science alone can render truth about the world and reality. Scientism's single-minded adherence to only the empirical, or testable, makes it a strictly scientific worldview, in much the same way that a Protestant fundamentalism that rejects science can be seen as a strictly religious worldview. Scientism sees it necessary to do away with most, if not all, metaphysical, philosophical, and religious claims, as the truths they proclaim cannot be apprehended by the scientific method.
In essence, scientism sees science as the absolute and only justifiable access to the truth.
(http://www.meta-library.net/gengloss/sciism-body.html).
While this is true as far as it goes, in my view scientism does have a god and it is repeatedly named in the writings of scientists. It is called “Nature“ or “Mother Nature,“ or, in Einstein's reverential term, “Der Alte,“ the Old One. And a faith goes with that god, the faith that scientific methodology will never be blocked by an impassable barrier of irrationality. Yet, like our own secular god, Justice, the deity of scientism is blind because it contains no attributes of consciousness, purpose or value -- no cosmic agenda. “Scientism“ was, in fact, a term coined by sociologists to refer to a particular kind of fundamentalist ideology or culture in the scientific community, one founded on the hoary concepts of "materialism." It is not the outcome of the empiricism and reason which Shermer describes as “the twin pillars of a philosophy of life appropriate for an Age of Science.“ It is instead a complex of a priori assumptions about reality that tightly circumscribe the boundaries of knowledge and constrict its possibility to a certain methodology and, more importantly, a specific ontology. Everthing outside that archaic ontology is considered "supernatural" or "paranormal." When quantum physics was in its infancy and physicists were still wise and not merely smart, Sir James Jeans wrote,
It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference‹inference either intuitive or deliberate. Probably it would never have occurred to us (as a serious hypothesis) that the world could be based on anything else, had we not been under the impression that there was a rival stuff with a more comfortable kind of “concrete” reality – something too inert and stupid to be capable of forging an illusion. (1932, 168)
What this quotation means is that the materialism of scientism is not the only and not the best ontology for science. As I argued in The Mind Paradigm, the view "that the substratum of everything is of mental character" does not make it one wit more difficult to do science and, in fact, makes "doing science" a far more meaningful endeavor. It will then be no surprise to you that, contrary to Shermer's view that scientism is on "the rise," my view is that it is already in decline. In Shermer's opinion, the value of scientism is that “cosmology and evolutionary theory ask the ultimate origin questions that have traditionally been the province of religion and theology. Scientism is courageously proffering naturalistic answers that supplant supernaturalistic ones for those whose needs are not being met by these ancient cultural traditions.“
What are the “naturalistic“ answers being courageously proffered to satisfy our unmet needs? One of Shermer's idols, the late Stephen Jay Gould, following Jacques Monod and other Darwinian fundamentalists, was eager to show that there is no evidence for a tendency for intelligent life to exist but much to indicate that its existence is pure contingency. At one branch of the tree after another, he argued, the “wheels of chance” were the deciding factor and “the unpredictability of evolutionary pathways asserts itself against our hope for the inevitability of consciousness.” (Gould 1989: 316) He concluded that, “biology’s most profound insight into human nature, status, and potential lies in the simple phrase, the embodiment of contingency: Homo sapiens is an entity, not a tendency.” (op. cit.: 320) Well, it is certainly enlightening for this shaman to tell us our existence has such a solid foundation: pure dumb luck.
Another of Shermer's idols, Richard Dawkins, propounds the doctrine that we are “throwaway survival machines“ for primordial “replicators.“ These replicators, Dawkins supposes, were “bathed in a soup rich in the small building block molecules [amino acids] necessary to make copies.“ But there were a lot of replicators and only so many building blocks, so, he says, “There was a struggle for existence among replicatory varieties. They did not know they were struggling, or indeed were without feelings of any kind. But they were struggling, in the sense that any mis-copying resulting in a new higher level of stability, or a new way of reducing the stability of rivals, was automatically preserved and multiplied.“ In short, all life forms, including human beings, have evolved not for the sake of what that life form can be or do but for the sake of being better containers to insure the survival of the replicators. Those replicators, Dawkins avers, “are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.“ (1989: 20) It is also encouraging to know that we have a purpose in life, to ensure the survival of the genes we happen to be containing.
Dawkins tells us, “The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.“ This, of course, is complete nonsense. As I have pointed out repeatedly, the real engineers that create living organisms are the ribosomes and their ancillary metabolic engines. They are themselves made principally of proteins and are the creative instrumentalities that build several hundred thousand different kinds of proteins from templates provided by the genes. Genes by themselves do nothing but hang around in the file room until the ribosomes need them. This point has been forcefully made in a recent paper by Carol Ezell in Scientific American (April 2002, p. 42ff.) entitled “Proteins Rule.“ Ms. Ezell begins her paper, “Move over, human genome, your day in the spotlight is coming to a close. Researchers are now concentrating on the human proteome, the collective body of proteins made by a person's cells and tissues. The genome–the full set of genetic information in the body–contains only the recipes for making proteins; it's the proteins that constitute the bricks and mortar of cells and that do most of the works.“ She might as well have begun the article, “Move over, Richard Dawkins . . .“
One could multiply these examples manifold but they all echo the declaration the great French biologist, Jacques Monod, who wrote in Chance and Necessity what either has all the fervor of a religious faith or a cry of despair, depending on your point of view,
Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among many other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition‹or the hope‹that on this score our position is ever likely to be revised. (1948, 112)
Yet, since that 1948 declaration, Monod's “sole conceivable hypothesis“ has been questioned and revised many times and will keep on being revised. But to return to Shermer's “God,“ Stephen Hawking says in A Brief History of Time, “Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why.“ He himself elaborates on the “why“ question:
Even if there only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him? (1990, 174)
In other words, one of the greatest theoretical cosmologists of our time is left asking questions that are positively sophomoric. And yet he has the chutzpah to suggest that if a “complete theory“ is discovered, “it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason–for then we would know the mind of God.“ (op. cit., 175) But suppose, as you lay in bed at night, like Charley Brown you asked the "Why" question. From Hawking's God you would get the same answer Charley did: "I hate questions like that." Or perhaps the voice would reply, à la Hawking, "I don't answer Why questions."
The problem with Shermer is that he acquired a doctorate in the history of science but remains totally myopic when it comes to the history of knowledge. In all eras of human history, humans have sought and found knowledge of the world in which they live from two sources: exploration of the inner world of the psyche and exploration of the outer world as it appears to the senses. Before and after what I call the Greek Hiatus from about 600-300 BCE, the principle mode of human thought and expression in the Western world was mythopoeia.
Mythic thought did not distinguish between spiritual wisdom, which afforded answers to the “why“ questions and external information about the “what“ questions. In his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas made a heroic and brilliant attempt to synthesize the spiritual wisdom of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition with the best science of his time, founded as it was on Aristotelian physics and Ptolemaic astronomy. The synthesis failed, of course, not only because of the hackneyed reason that better science appeared after the Renaissance but because spiritual wisdom could not be bound by a single tradition. Throughout the Modern Era, roughly from1500 to 1900, many outstanding scientists remained committed to biblical creationism. It was Darwin's evolutionary theories that forced a choice between the bible stories and science.
The co-creator of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace, broke with Darwin not because of biblical literalism but because Darwin's interpretation of evolution left no room for the human soul. I myself do not believe in an enduring individual soul that survives death but neither does the profoundest spiritual wisdom of our species. In fact, it tells us precisely the opposite, that only by divesting the ego of its pretense to permanence can it realize its true nature, the infinite consciousness which is beyond time and change.
Another of Shermer's idols, E. O. Wilson, writes,
The empiricist argument holds that if we explore the biological roots of moral behavior, and explain their material origins and biases, we should be able to fashion a wise and enduring ethical consensus. The current expansion of scientific inquiry into the deeper processes of human thought makes this venture feasible. The choice between transcendentalism and empiricism will be the coming century's version of the struggle for men's souls. Moral reasoning will either remain centered in idioms of theology and philosophy, where it is now, or shift toward science-based material analysis. Where it settles will depend on which world view is proved correct, or at least which is more widely perceived to be correct. (E. O. Wilson, “The Biological Basis of Morality,“ The Atlantic online, April 1998, (http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98apr/biomoral.htm)
In my view, this notion reflects what I called in The Android Myth “The Schizophrenia of the Twentieth Century.“ It is a schizophrenia that has made spiritual wisdom and scientific understanding adversarial rather than producing the “consilience“ Wilson proclaims to be his aim. Contrast his view with that of Fritzof Capra,
I see science and mysticism as two complementary manifestations of the human mind; of its rational and intuitive faculties.
The modern physicist experiences the world through an extreme specialization of the rational mind; the mystic through an extreme specialization of the intuitive mind. The two approaches are entirely different and involve far more than a certain view of the physical world. However, they are complementary, as we have learned to say in physics. Neither is comprehended in the other, nor can either of them be reduced to the other; but both of them are necessary, supplementing one another for a fuller understanding of the world.
Mysticism does not confute the validity of science but it rejects the validity of “scientism.“ Neither does science confute the validity of mysticism. It has no reason to because it is self-dedicated to the sensory world and thus offers no insight on the nonsensory. Scientism, therefore, cannot deny the validity of mysticism on scientific grounds but only on the basis of a priori materialist assumptions that are not at all necessary to the practice of science. It also highlights another insidious effect of scientism. It not only tries to strangle the human spirit but places unwarranted restrictions on science itself.
Shermer and his brother and sister (let us not forget Susan Blackmore) skeptics continually conflate the supernatural with the paranormal. The existence of some (not all) paranormal phenomena has been well established by rigorous scientific investigation on a par with the highest standards of the physical sciences but I know of no reputable parapsychologist at least since the time of J. B. Rhine who attributes parapsychic phenomena to “supernatural“ agencies. What has been lacking in parapsychology is a central theory that is consistent with the rest of scientific theory. I offered one in PSI: What it is and How it works but I do not claim it is a final theory or the only possible one. Any such theory will, however, require stretching the imagination of scientific theory beyond the restrictions set by scientistic materialism.
Is a universe not founded on matter unthinkable? If it is, then by all means Scientific American should never have published such heretical notions as those of Markopoulou Kalamara in its December 2002 edition:
Markopoulou Kalamara approached LQG's extraneous space problem by asking, Why not start with Penrose's spin networks (which are not embedded in any preexisting space), mix in some of the results of LQG and see what comes out? The result was networks that do not live in space and are not made of matter. Rather their very architecture gives rise to space and matter. In this picture, there are no things, only geometric relationships. Space ceases to be a place where objects such as particles bump and jitter and instead becomes a kaleidoscope of every changing patterns and processes.
Each spin network resembles a snapshot, a frozen moment in the universe. Off paper, the spin networks evolve and change based on simple mathematical rules and becoming bigger and more complex, eventually developing into the largescale space we inhabit. (emphasis added)
In short, physics is quite able to dispense with the archaic concept of "matter" as it probes deeper and deeper into the inferential universe based on sensory observations but scientism clings to it desperately when it comes to anything outside its dogmatically defined boundaries. What then do these proposed “Shamans of Scientism“ have to offer. Shermer says scientism is “courageously proffering naturalistic answers that supplant supernaturalistic ones and in the process is providing spiritual sustenance for those whose needs are not being met by these ancient cultural traditions.“ It is clear, however, from the writings of those “shamans“ he extols that they have no “spiritual sustenance“ to offer.
But why do we need shamans of any kind? Shamans had an important role in lower Neolithic societies. They were the psychophysical repairmen of cultures, the ones who were called on to patch up the social or physical wounds that traumatized early peoples from time to time. The highest places of honor were, however, not accorded to shamans but to the chiefs and councils of elders. In the period of civilization, veneration went to the gods and the god-kings. The shaman role was transferred to the high priests. What Shermer is describing is a new class of high priests. He claims that “we are, at base, a socially hierarchical primate species. We show deference to our leaders, pay respect to our elders and follow the dictates of our shamans; this being the Age of Science, it is scientism's shamans who command our veneration.“
I agree that we are indeed in a new age but one which is showing itself to be increasingly heterarchical rather than hierarchical, consensual rather than authoritative. And it is an egregious error to call it the Age of Science. It is the Age of Openness. The explorers of the spirit, as well as scientists, are pioneers in this new culture, exchanging traditionalism for universalism, spiritual experimentation for creeds and confessions. It is an age in which we are learning to dispense with shamans or high priests of any kind.
Shermer encapsulates the final alleged contribution of scientism as follows:
Third, because of language we are also storytelling, mythmaking primates, with scientism as the foundational stratum of our story and scientists as the premier mythmakers of our time.
I may have been grossly misled but my impression was that we had outgrown mythopoeia as a mode of thought and that science promised to deliver knowledge, not more myths. Nearly 400 years ago, Descartes started off the new era of philosophy by vowing to take nothing on authority. He thoroughly botched his own efforts to follow that vow but it is still good advice. As for Scientific American, I have been a subscriber since what is in their "50 years ago" section was front page news. Now, however, I think its publisher has three choices if the prestigious journal is to maintain its integrity:
(1) Delete the Skeptic page.
(2) Introduce a new page to balance the Skeptic page with constructive thinking.
(3) Come "out of the closet," openly join the Skeptic and the Skeptical Inquirer magazines as a purveyor of materialist fundamentalism, and change the magazine's name to Scientistic American.
My personal preference is (2) because there are enough opinions like Shermer's being published that their faults need to be exposed and what better place to do it than before the 700,000+ readership of Scientific American.
I think it is only fitting to conclude these remarks with a quotation from one of Shermer's own “shamans,“ Carl Sagan: Baloney, bamboozles, careless thinking, flimflam, and wishes disguised as facts are not restricted to parlor magic and ambiguous advice on matters of the heart. Unfortunately, they ripple through mainstream political, social, religious, and economic issues in every nation. (Sagan 1997: 244)
I would only add that they also ripple through science. And baloney, thy name is Scientism!]
|