04.30.08
Science, atheism, and metaphysics
Berlinski: The Scientific Embrace of Atheism
Why shouldn’t the scientific community find atheism so attractive a doctrine? It is only sensible for scientists to suggest aggressively that no power exceeds their own.
It is entirely apt to point out that many of the early modern, indeed, nineteenth century, scientists were not atheists. And it is entirely right for that and other reasons to challenge the recent attempts to ‘atheize science’.
On the other hand there is nothing particulary wrong with atheist science, save only that the immediate temptation arises (and arose with Darwin) to suggest that the findings of science/evolution not only justify but logically legitimate atheism.
At the point it is worth reviewing the history of emergent secularism in the version of the philosopher Kant whose ‘critiques of reason’ began with an implicit warning of just this kind of outcome. His critique was not solely of rationalist metaphysics, but of the ‘empiricism’ of the scientists. It seems like overshoot and undershoot. Metaphysics detected in the high end is replaced with metaphysics undetected on the low end. And the stance of scientism is indeed on of a concealed metaphysics, yielding finally one of its notable instances: atheism itself, taken as a science, to disguise its metaphysical character. Read the rest of this entry »