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John Silber, University Professor of Philosophy and Law and President Emeritus of Boston University, contrasts science and scientism, defending the former and condemning the latter. In a lengthy and rambling essay in The New Criterion, Dr Silber surveys firstly his own spiritual path and then the trajectory of modern science. He was raised in a Reformed Protestant church and, as he grew older, came to appreciate as well the strengths of Roman Catholicism.
Dr Silber is deeply troubled by the loss of religious presence in the public square and attributes this to the rise and spread of "anti-humanistic and deracinated secularism". Friedrich Nietzsche was the great prophet of this movement, most prominently with his famous 1882 announcement of the death of God.
Nietzsche foretold the total eclipse of all values in the absence of divinely sanctioned moral codes and denied the possibility of belief in moral obligations without the authority of a God who supports them with a divine imperative.
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His prophetic powers have been accurately assessed by Tom Wolfe. In Hooking Up, Wolfe writes, "[I]n the peaceful decade of the 1880s, it must have seemed far-fetched to predict the world wars of the twentieth century and the barbaric brotherhoods of Nazism and communism. . . . Behold the prophet!" Who can now question the accuracy of Nietzsche’s . . . dire predictions?
The Nietzschean view is reflected in many modern scientists who maintain that human behaviour is fundamentally outside our conscious choice and free will. "In the final analysis, what an individual human being thinks or does cannot be an expression of his will or his consciousness but, to use the current metaphor, of the way he is wired." This is what Dr Silber means by scientism, "this reductionistic unscientific extension of science [that] has furthered the climate of anti-humanist secularism and practical atheism in universities and intellectual circles."
The widespread acceptance of proto-Nietzschean nihilism baffles Dr Silber.
Why should anyone as an act of faith—one dominant among the proponents of scientism—accept a view according to which our experience as conscious, purposeful, and morally responsible individuals is dismissed as illusory? Edward O. Wilson’s observation that an "organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA" is refuted by organisms like Mozart, Shakespeare, and Michelangelo, whose DNA made few offspring but many enduring works of art.
The Bible comes far closer to the truth in noting that man is created only a little lower than the angels, and Sophocles was right to sing of the wonder of man.
No one should deny the rich fabric of human experience on the unproven claims of a faith that empties our lives of all meaning and purpose. A faith that allows for the full expression of our nature provides a better home for human beings than the reductionistic extremes of scientism. There is undeniable greatness in the human spirit and nothing can be said, much less proved, to deny so obvious and obdurate a fact.
There is much more to Dr Silber’s essay that I have not covered. He accepts evolutionary theory and rejects special creationism, and is highly critical of those he sees as dogmatists on the two extreme ends of opinion about evolution. I encourage those interested in this to read the whole thing.
