The Folly of Scientism

Over the past several decades, the public contempt for religion and philosophical speculation has grown commensurate with the official support of the scientific community by government agencies.  Science is big business.  The government is growing along with it, and grant-giving agencies exist in a symbiotic relationship.

This trend isn’t slowing, it is accelerating with the demand for more students in STEM subject areas, which allegedly must begin in early childhood education.

This obsession with only one branch of human knowing is in keeping with a technological society that considers everything it does as a commodity, including human nature.  It is not for no reason that the language related to the propagation of the human race has transformed from the transferral of one’s being inherent in the word ‘begetting’ and ‘procreation’ to a concept amenable to cloning:  ‘reproduction’.

As human life becomes increasingly dominated by technology, it not only becomes impossible for many to think that a human nature exists outside technological control, it is a distasteful prospect to consider it.

The self-loathing of the human body is seen throughout our technological society.

“Central to scientism is the grabbing of nearly the entire territory of what were once considered questions that properly belong to philosophy. Scientism takes science to be not only better than philosophy at answering such questions, but the only means of answering them.”

Read the full article in The New Atlantis