Quotes About Scientism

the importance of preserving the integrity of a non-scientific form of understanding, the kind of understanding characteristic of the arts and the kind of understanding that Goethe, Spengler and Wittgenstein sought to protect from the encroachment of science and scientism.

Qualia are difficult, propositional attitudes are difficult, selves are difficult, so away they must go: they cannot be accommodated in the third-person neurophilosophical framework that combines scientism with an analytical outlook that prefers concepts to consciousness, placing consciousness-free language at the heart of the human mind.[

The assumption that 'if science can't see it, then it is isn't real' has nothing to do with science and everything to do with 'scientism'—belief in the 'omnicompetence of science';[30] more precisely, in the omnicompetence of a sub-set of sciences—the natural, rather than the social, sciences

To speak of the 'properties of matter' while asserting at the same time that 'matter is inert' is an insoluble contradiction; and, by a strange irony, modern 'scientism', which claims to eliminate all 'mystery', nonetheless appeals in its vain attempts at explanation only to the very thing that is most 'mysterious' in the popular sense of the word, that is to say most obscure and least intelligible!

But in the mid-nineteenth century, grasping for the certitude and authority the church was quickly losing in the face of rationalism and scientism, Catholics declared the Pope to be "infallible," and Evangelicals decided the Bible was "inerrant," despite the fact that we had gotten along for most of eighteen hundred years without either belief. In fact, these claims would have seemed idolatrous to most early Christians.

Although Lewis's Trilogy is too often portrayed as an uninformed and inaccurate attack on science, a closer look reveals that it is, in fact, a prophetic warning against scientism and an inspiring vision for a regenerate science. Lewis warns that scientism -- a caricature of science that rejects all moral goods except survival and abandons objective truth in favor of power -- will dehumanize us by stripping us of pity, happiness, and freedom.

Distortion and suppression of the truth is encouraged by a prevailing attitude of scientism, not science itself but rather a certain attitude of veneration toward science as the exclusive means of obtaining truth

I discovered that I was not opposed to mankind but only to man-centeredness, anthropocentricity, the opinion that the world exists solely for the sake of man; not to science, which means simply knowledge, but to science misapplied, to the worship of technique and technology, and to that perversion of science properly called scientism; and not to civilization but to culture.

Every one of these claims embodies a metaphysical assumption, and science, since its very method presupposes them, could not possibly defend them without arguing in a circle. Their defense is instead a task for metaphysics, and for philosophy more generally; and scientism is shown thereby to be incoherent.

New Paganism may be defined as an outlook on life that holds to the sufficiency of human science without faith, and the sufficiency of human power without grace. In other words, its two tenets are Scientism which is a deification of the experimental method, and Humanism, which is a glorification of a man who makes God to his own image and likeness.

I am critical of modernity giving science and technology a blank check as if it were the fountain of all truth. That is not true. And I think I may have introduced a word which has now caught on quite a bit, scientism. Science is good. It simply reports a discovery.

We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism -- a Mongoloid metaphysic.

For Habermas, scientism means science's belief in itself: that is, 'the conviction that we can no longer understand science as one form of knowledge, but rather must identify knowledge with science'.

there is a felt gap here-the gap between knowledge and wisdom- that cannot be closed through empirical enquiry. That is, the question of the meaning of life in not reducible to empirical enquiry. This felt gap between knowkedge and wisdom is the very space of critical reflection. In philosophy, but also more generally in cultural life, we need to clip the wings of both scientism and obscurantism and thereby avoid what is worst in both Continental and analytic philosophy.

Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other.

When God "died" in the 19th century, "social-ism" took the form of materialist scientism (hence the philosopher Eric Voegelin's observation that under Marxism, "Christ the Redeemer is replaced by the steam engine as the promise of the realm to come"). It's worth recalling that both Marx and Engels came to their socialism via their atheism, not the other way around.

The people I really do dislike are the morally unimaginative kind of evolutionary reductionists who, in the name of science, think they can explain everything in terms of our early hominid ancestors or our genes, with their combination of high-handed tone and disregard for history. Such reductive speculation encourages a really empty scientism.

Scientism and godism are superstitions, one blindly believes in what's visible, the other blindly believes in what's invisible.

If you hear advice from a grandmother or elders, odds are that it works 90 percent of the time. On the other hand, in part because of scientism and academic prostitution, in part because the world is hard, if you read anything by psychologists and behavioral scientists, odds are that it works at less than 10 percent, unless it is has also been covered by the grandmother and the classics, in which case why would you need a psychologist?

But we don't easily translate this to other domains and remain victims of scientism

the worrying gap that seems to persist between the spontaneity of reason and the passivity of sensibility can be overcome if one no longer thinks of nature exclusively in the deterministic terms of modern scientism;

Many people have replaced religion with scientism in Western culture. Scientists are the new priests.

Unfortunately, many scientists have lost sight of the fact that science is based on a faith that there exist rational, discoverable laws. Indeed, scientists have their own faith. For example, one of Scientism's dogma is that all of reality came to being from nothing, and then this nothing exploded and created all of reality. A more fantastical and fable-like story could not be imagined!

During the coming years, there will be a great focus on science, to the exclusion of all other opinions about reality. Science and technology are good and helpful pursuits, but science is only one aspect of reality. Those who worship at the altar of Scientism, are only viewing one part of the whole.