Grand Opening!

This is my first post for the Scientism and You blog. It seems to me that there is a lot of confusion about Scientism and its place in society, and I will try to make some sense of this issue with this blog. First, let's start with a link that I feel exemplifies this confusion.

The author here is lambasting Rabbi Lerner on his positions of Scientism, Religion, and Politics. The subsequent posts to his blog continue to show this confusion.

So here is my opinion on the matter: The author and his supporters are suffering from a straw man fallacy. They are so busy attacking their opponents dogma that they fail to attack his meaning. What I mean here is that they are attacking religious practices and dogmatic beliefs when, in fact, Lerner is actually discussing the idea that scientism does no one any justice; scientists, religious believers, or atheists.

Truly I must agree with the author that Lerner equates Secularists with Atheists and this could be a problem, specifically when discussing politics. However, I feel that we can overlook the small margin of error, especially since the authors supporters make even broader generalizations about people from religious backgrounds (see the post by Aquarius on the page linked above).

So now that I've gotten all of that out of the way... I don't believe he is the creator of this idea, but in Ken Wilbur's book "Science and Religion: The marriage of sense and soul", the author talks about the idea that humans work in three different realms (I'll use my words for them here as I don't remember his, but the idea is the same): The realm of matter, the realm of mind, and the realm of spirit. In the realm of matter, we have the laws of physics, biology (yes, including evolution), chemistry, etc. In the realm of mind we have sociology, ethics, and formal logic. In the realm of spirit we have emotions, creativity (as in art), and morals. These three realms can also be thought of, respectively, as "it", "we", and "I", or "stuff", "society", and "the person".

When viewed philosophically, not dogmatically, Lerner's point is that science is limited to the realm of matter and makes no claim in the realms of mind or spirit, and that "scientism" is the fallacy that comes about when people force science to make claims in realms in which it doesn't belong. The problem with the opinion in the link above is that it falsely assumes that religion is making the same mistake by stepping outside of its realm and making claims about the realm of "it", which is clearly not where religion belongs. When religion makes claims about the realm of "it", we come up with dogma, those particular religious beliefs that, when taken literally, can not be verified (or can be found to be false) by science, the true master of "it". It is true that many religious people believe that religion can explain everything about the universe, but this is no more true than people of science believing that science can explain everything about the universe ("Scientism"). So let's stop casting stones over who is more wrong.... both groups are equally wrong.

Finally, I'd like to say to the atheists, that just because something in the realm of spirit (e.g. religion) is not scientifically verifiable does not negate the entire realm (or religion). Yes, the Bible says that Jonah was swallowed by a whale, and yes, we know that if someone was actually swallowed by a whale they would almost certainly die. However, if we get caught up in the details of the story, we end up missing the whole point. I think far too many religious people get caught up in the details, so it only makes sense that anti-religion atheists make the same mistake about religious dogma.

Don't worry, folks! My posts won't normally be this long!