Readers may recall that Steve Fuller is a University of Warwick sociologist who has studied ID as a movement in science and said some insightful things. In response to Nathaniel Comfort’s recent essay against “scientism,” Fuller noted in a letter to Nature:
In my view, it is a misuse of history to oversee the future. What counts as good and bad in scientific practice or in science-based policies can be understood only in retrospect, because our judgement depends on witnessing the consequences. As we move forward in history, those judgements will change. It follows that the moral character of any action is indeterminate at the time it happens. Science itself is a quantum phenomenon — and ‘scientism’ is its observer effect.
Steve Fuller, “Science is a quantum phenomenon — ‘scientism’ is its observer effect” at Nature
Rob Sheldon, our physics color commentator and author of Genesis: The Long Ascent and The Long Ascent, Volume II, weighs in,
Steve Fuller is a historian of science, and as such, takes umbrage when others redefine the technical terms in his field. It makes it rather difficult to discuss the history of ideas, if the words constantly mutate, and this is what he is objecting to in his comment. The word “scientism” is older than 1979, and has had a rather defined meaning over the years. I would further add that the word carries its pejorative connotation because it says that the perpetrator of “scientism” has made science and/or the practice of science into an “-ism” by being ideological, and hence, irrational.
Fuller’s short comment is illuminated by their respective biographies.
Nathaniel Comfort, a BS in marine biology at Berkeley in 1985 but PhD in history from SUNY in 1997, is now a historian of biology at Johns Hopkins.
Steve Fuller, a BS in history at Columbia in 1979 and a PhD in the “history and philosophy of science” at Pittsburgh in 1985, is currently a professor of sociology and social policy at the University of Durham.
The first thing to notice is that Comfort got his history degree some 12 years after Fuller, which may account for their differing definitions.
A second thing is that Fuller has been in the field of history all his career, whereas Comfort moved from biology to history. Which is to say, that Comfort imbibed Methodological Naturalism long before he had a word to describe it, whereas Fuller learned the word before he encountered it.
And finally, a third thing that is now becoming more of a nuance, is that Comfort did all his history work in trendy North-East schools where Derrida is name-dropped in every lecture, whereas Fuller moved from a BS at a trendy NE school to a PhD at Pittsburgh (rather more gritty) and now is a prof at a prestigious British school (where Derrida is French, after all.)
So when Comfort launches into his “scientism” = bourgois-Derrida-racist-reductionism rant, he expects applause from his peers, whereas Fuller is quite annoyed. Not only does Comfort destroy the previous meaning of the word, but he hijacks it for a jeremiad against racist science masquerading as cognition research. That is, he glomms onto one of the great mysteries of materialist science—the sense of self—and proceeds to vivisect research programmes with self-righteous post-Modern ridicule.
Now I may be reading into Fuller’s short rebuttal, but I sense that Fuller detests post-Moderns because even when they have a valid point, they abuse it so shamefully that one hesitates to even agree, lest one be found complicit in the damage. Post-modernists, which Comfort seems to identify with, have a valid point about scientism’s ideological foundation on MN, but rather than rationally correct the error, as Phillip Johnson spent 29 years doing, they treat it as an ethical lapse justifying their own ideological, irrational behavior.
See also: Nathaniel Comfort, Fresh Off An Op-Ed In Nature, Skewers Pop Darwinian Steven Pinker
and
Is there life Post-Truth? (a review of Fuller’s recent book)
This seems to be a very strange statement for a historian of science to make:
Contrary to what Steve Fuller may believe, it is easy to see that any scientific practice, such as methodological naturalism and/or reductive materialism, that presupposes the non-existence of God, is going to have horrid moral consequences for man in the future.
As Adam Sedgewick warned Charles Darwin himself, “”There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as a physical. A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly…. Were it possible (which thank God it is not) to break it, humanity in my mind, would suffer a damage that might brutalize it—& sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history.,,,”
Shoot, even Charles Darwin himself foresaw the horrid moral consequences of his own theory,
Why Darwin did not recoil in horror at the devastating moral implications of his own theory, and reject his theory right on the spot, I have no idea.
Indeed even Heinrich Heine, in 1831, poetically prophesied what would happen to Germany, and to the world at large, if the ‘moral restraint’ of Christianity were removed from Germany:
Thus, it is easy to see, contrary to what Steve Fuller may believe, that any scientific practice, such as methodological naturalism and/or reductive materialism, that presupposes the non-existence of God, is going to have horrid moral consequences for man.
As Albert Einstein himself noted, “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind,,”
Moreover, Einstein’s observation that “Conflicts between science and religion have all sprung from fatal errors” is far truer that Einstein apparently realized at the time he wrote that statement.
The widespread presupposition within science, i.e. that methodological naturalism and/or reductive materialism is the supposed ‘ground rule’ for doing science, itself is based on a lie, i.e. on a ‘fatal error’.
Contrary to what many people have been falsely led to believe about Intelligent Design being a pseudo-science, the fact of the matter is that all of science, every nook and cranny of it, is based on the presupposition of intelligent design and is certainly not based on the presupposition of methodological naturalism.
From the essential Christian presuppositions that undergird the founding of modern science itself, (namely that the universe is rational and that the minds of men, being made in the ‘image of God’, can dare understand that rationality), to the intelligent design of the scientific instruments and experiments themselves, to the logical and mathematical analysis of experimental results themselves, from top to bottom, science itself is certainly not to be considered a ‘natural’ endeavor of man.
Not one scientific instrument would ever exist if men did not first intelligently design that scientific instrument. Not one test tube, microscope, telescope, spectroscope, or etc.. etc.., was ever found just laying around on a beach somewhere which was ‘naturally’ constructed by nature. Not one experimental result would ever be rationally analyzed since there would be no immaterial minds to rationally analyze the immaterial logic and immaterial mathematics that lay behind the intelligently designed experiments in the first place.
Moreover, although the Darwinist firmly believes he is on the terra firma of science, (in his appeal, even demand, for methodological naturalism), the fact of the matter is that Darwinists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to:
Thus again, although the Darwinian Atheist firmly believes he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for methodological naturalism), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to.
It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science, (and indeed more antagonistic to the moral well being of man himself), than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.
Supplemental note: