[Avodah] Limits of Scientism

[Micha Berger via Avodah]

There is an interesting article in NewScientist.com about the limits
of the kind of questions science can answer.
<https://www.newscientist.com/article/2096315>

    A rational nation ruled by science would be a terrible idea
    Jeffrey Guhin

    Imagine a future society in which everything is perfectly logical. What
    could go wrong?

    "Scientism" is the belief that all we need to solve the world's
    problems is - you guessed it - science. People sometimes use the phrase
    "rational thinking", but it amounts to the same thing. If only people
    would drop religion and all their other prejudices, we could use logic
    to fix everything.

    Last week, US astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson offered up the perfect
    example of scientism when he proposed the country of Rationalia, in
    which "all policy shall be based on the weight of evidence".
    ...
    In fact, creationism has a lot more in common with scientism than
    people such as Tyson or Richard Dawkins would ever admit. Like Tyson,
    creationists begin with certain prior commitments ("evolution cannot be
    true", for example, substitutes for "science cannot be wrong") and
    build an impressively consistent argument upon them. Just about
    everyone is guilty of some form of [43]"motivated reasoning": we begin
    with certain priors, and then find a way to get the evidence to do what
    we want.

    Scientists can't tell us [44]if it's right to kill a baby with a
    developmental disability, despite how well they might marshal evidence
    about the baby's life prospects or her capacity to think or move on her
    own. There's no easy answer on how we ought to weigh those things up,
    just like there's no easy way to decide whether tradition is superior
    to efficiency or monogamy is better than lots of random sex.

    Scientism refuses to see this. The myopia of scientism, its naive
    utopianism and simplistic faith, bears an uncanny resemblance to the
    religious dogmatisms that people such as Tyson and Dawkins denounce.

I have mentioned something similar here in the past, in discussions of
brain vs heart death. Science can provide a lot of information about
the various medical states a body can be in. But it cannot answer the
question of which we are supposed to treat as alive weith all the moral
rights and duties that implies. It can help us apply a dfinition in a sane
way. But it cannot actually determine which dividing line is appropriate.

We might find it intuitive today to associate death with the loss of
the ability to ever again be conscious. Or with breain stem death. But
if "dead" refers to an emotional attachment for the soul to the body,
and mesorah tells us this happens at heart death, then the most medicine
can do is help us determine heart death. Again, if that is the correct
definition; I am not positing an answer, just showing that one possible
(and common) answer is inherently outside of science.

And so is the proper and moral way to run society.

Last night's Aspaqlaria blog post also touches on the similarity between
scientism and other fundamentalisms <http://www.aishdas.org/asp/g-d-gaps>.

    The pagans worshiped deities to drive out the fear of the unknown.
    Blaming lightning on Thor does give the person hopes to control
    lightning by appeasing its god. But logically prior to that, blaming
    it on Thor takes it out of the realm of the unknown. And so the pagan
    associates the gods with things they don't understand and can't get
    a handle on. And thus the pagan stops seeing his gods in things they
    can explain philosophically or scientifically. This is the "God of
    the Gaps" -- the god who lives only in the gaps in human knowledge.

    And this mentality apparently motivates much of our internal
    science-and-Torah debates. On one side, we have people who feel that
    if we don't accept every miraculous claim of every medrash in its
    maximal and most extreme sense, we reduce G-d. They see G-d in the
    gaps, and therefore are maximizing G-d by insisting on the greatest
    possible gaps. On the other side, we have people with a near deist
    conception of G-d, where only that which cannot be explained in
    natural terms are left as miracles. His Wisdom is seen as being
    within nature, and miracles a concession. But they too are obsessing
    on G-d in relation to the gaps.

    In contrast, our rishonim found the need for miracle to be
    problematic. Why would a perfect G-d be unable to design a universe
    that could run without His further intervention? This is part of why
    the Seforno mentions in his introduction to parashas Chuqas and the
    Rambam (on Avos 5:6) place the design of miracles within the week
    of creation. They may be unique events, but they are placed within
    the original design.

    Science is evidence of a single unique G-d who implemented the
    universe with Divine Wisdom and a specific design. A pagan's world
    of events happening on the whim of warring gods could never produce
    science. Even the Greeks who started Natural Philosophy, such as
    Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, rolling rejected their own gods
    as mythical or irrelevant, and discussed the world in terms of a
    single Creator.

    Belief in G-d is to explain questions of ought -- morality and ethics
    -- and of purpose. Religion only overlaps with science incidentally.

    With pride and confidence in science and technology, a real believer
    feels more in control by placing G-d within science.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             You are where your thoughts are.
micha at aishdas.org                - Ramban, Igeres haQodesh, Ch. 5
http://www.aishdas.org
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