Science vs. religion : what scientists really think - File PDF

138Society and Broader Publicsconsideration in this view, because true scientism potentially disregards religionaltogether. But scientists often feel that their colleagues should see religiousways of knowing as separate and even valuable distinctions from scientificways.I asked a political scientist, 27 a Catholic who teaches at an Ivy League school,whether he sees an inherent conflict between religion and science. He told methat he had invested a great deal in thinking about these issues and in particular,the relationships between religion, science, and the cultural transmission ofscience:I certainly don’t think that there’s any conflict between science and religion. Ithink . . . science aims at understanding the facts of the physical world. It has nodirect concern with whatever lies beyond the physical world, the spiritualworld . . . . I’m saying that science cannot establish certain key premises that areneeded to navigate ethics.His advice for scientists and others interested in the public transmission ofscience is that “science [should] not pretend to be able to solve spiritual orethical problems and not pronounce on things that it has no authority to pronounceon.” Because he has clearly thought about such things extensively, Iasked him to explain what he means by limiting the expanse of science. He saidhe really wants to see people “reject the scientistic mentality as opposed to thescientific”:Critics of this thing, scientism, define it as the idea that the only truths arethose truths that are apprehended by the application of scientific methods, byempirical work. There are a lot of reasons why that can’t be true, including thefact that it’s self-defeating to assert it. That is, if the assertion of it is true, it can’tbe true on the basis of scientific methods, because scientific methods can’t establishthat . . . . I want to be very critical of scientism, but I also want to be veryscience-affirming.He wants everyone to see “science not as an enemy but as the truest of truefriends. Even if the facts disclosed by science are uncomfortable.” His wordsevoked a major philosophic criticism of those who try to say that scientifictruth is the only truth. Such a claim, he insists, is one that science unaided byother forms of knowledge simply cannot make. 28Biologists, in particular, talked about having a responsibility to expoundupon the limits of science and the proper place of science in relationshipto religion, since their discipline often garners the most public criticism. A