Leon Kass has written an interesting though lengthy article in Commentary titled "Science, Religion, and the Human Future." The essay offers us a perceptive look at where the naturalistic, materialistic metaphysics of "scientism," the belief that science is the key to all knowledge and whatever can't be known through the scientific method is not worth talking about, is taking us. Kass has many excellent things to say in the piece, but perhaps the most important is his claim that scientism is self-refuting. I find this important because of what it entails about the future. Here's what Kass says:
[O]n the scientists' own grounds, they will be unable to refute our intransigent insistence on our own freedom and psychic awareness. For how are they going to explain our resistance to their subversive ideas, save by conceding that we must just be hard-wired by nature to resist them? If all truth claims of science - and the philosophical convictions that some people derive from them - are merely the verbalized expressions of certain underlying brain states in the scientists who offer these claims, then there can be no way to refute the contrary opinions of those whose nervous systems, differently wired, see things the opposite way.
And why, indeed, should anyone choose to accept as true the results of someone else's "electrochemical brain processes" over his own? Truth and error, no less than human freedom and dignity, become empty notions when the soul is reduced to chemicals.
This is frightening stuff when you consider the inmplications. If all knowledge is just a series of chemical reactions in the brain there's no "true" opinion anymore than there are "true" reactions. Moreover, no one can be held responsible for the opinion they hold since it is a product of environmental factors over which they have no control. In other words, all knowledge is determined by our brain chemistry.
This being so, how does one promote one's ideas of what's true among people whose brain chemistry is ill-disposed to accomodate it? The ineluctable answer is that truth and tolerance will give way to compulsion. Different groups will seek to impose their will by the exercise of power. If dissenters are troublesome, then like Rousseau and totalitarians before and since have advocated, they must be eliminated.
This is the logical endpoint of the view that man is just a chemical machine. Machines have no worth beyond their usefulness to their masters. They have no dignity and they have no rights.
Kass continues:
No one should underestimate the growing cultural power of scientific materialism and reductionism. As we have seen, the materialism of science, useful as a heuristic hypothesis, is increasingly being peddled as the one true account of human life, citing as evidence the powers obtainable on the basis of just such reductive approaches. Many laymen, ignorant of any defensible scientific alternative to materialism, are swallowing and regurgitating the shallow doctrines of "the selfish gene" and "the mind is the brain," because they seem to be vindicated by scientific advance. The cultural result is likely to be serious damage to human self-understanding and the subversion of all highminded views of the good life.
Materialist science cannot answer the question, How should we use our technology? The question is nonsense in a worldview bereft of moral value. So, eschewing the moral questions, scientism ...
... tacitly preaches its own version of faith, hope, and charity: faith in the goodness of scientific progress, hope in the promise of transcendence of our biological limitations, charity in promising everyone ultimate relief from, and transcendence of, the human condition. No religious faith rests on flimsier ground. And yet the project for the mastery of human nature proceeds apace, and most people stand on the sidelines and cheer.
Like the German citizens of the 1930s, they stand on the sidelines and cheer as we hurtle toward a brave, new, and horrifying world.
RLC