Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

188 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
“obvious” answers. Under such circumstances one despairs of achieving
anything like effective communication, but if Shaw’s dream of a vitalistic,
teleological science is ever to be realized, it is necessary to try.
Perhaps one should start with a recognition of the deep emotional needs
that underlie the “will-to-believe” on both sides. The vitalists are horrified
by the cold, soullessness of materialism. They have come, in no small part
at the insistence of scientists, to associate materialism with the entire enterprise
of science; they have thus come to be distrustful of science generally.
For their part, the scientists and materialists who boast a scientific
point of view see vitalism as a crackpot attack on reason, order, and the
very knowableness of the universe. It seems to them a know-nothing assault
on science itself. The vitalists need to be convinced that vitalism and
teleology are not incompatible with determinism; that the true object of
their fears is not determinism, but mechanism. The materialists must be
persuaded that a teleological universe is both orderly and knowable. The
first step will be to show that their materialism is actually in conflict with
their vaunted values of objectivity, logic, and skepticism and that science,
though unquestionably constrained by the restrictions of reason and empirical
observation it places on itself, is also subject to the same irrational
pressures that afflict ordinary mortals.
Karl Popper
Despite the impression one gets from Shaw, the idolatry of science did not
reach its apogee in the nineteenth century but in the 1920s, when Logical
Positivism became popular. The heir to Auguste Comte’s positivism, this
movement was stronger in its adulation of science than anything proposed
by Comte or his followers. It saw science as a slow, patient, but inexorable
accumulation of certain facts. Science could be trusted because it conscientiously
abstained from saying anything that could not be verified. They
took as their motto Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism “Wovon Man
nicht sprechen kann darüber muss Man schweigen” (If you have nothing
to say about something, you should hush). Declarations about anything
that could not be verified were regarded as empty metaphysical speculation,
and metaphysics was derided as literally nonsense: devoid of sense. It
was a mere abuse of language. The verification principle, which described
the method by which facts were to be ascertained, was to have been the
iron hoop that bound solid facts to the granite pillar of certainty. The verification
principle proved illusory, and the hoop of iron disintegrated into
rust. The weakness of the principle was evident almost from its promulga-