Science provides only one approach to the human condition -- and not always the most pertinent one.

Does science have answers 

to absolutely everything?

Denyse O'Leary

When Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker published an essay last summer, ”Science Is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians,” in The New Republic he can hardly have expected the result. His call to conversion to his dismissive materialist analysis garnered not merely an impassioned response but a widespread and intelligent demolition of the scientism he represents.

Scientism? It used to be an insult, implying that science answers all meaningful questions. But, as philosopher of science Alex Rosenberg, author of Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions, explains, a hard core of thinkers today believes that to be fact:

My conception of scientism is almost the same as that of those who use it as a term of abuse. They use the term to name the exaggerated and unwarranted confidence that science and its methods can answer all meaningful questions. I agree with that definition except for the "exaggerated" and "unwarranted" part.

Moreover, he says in the same 2012 interview, at Talking Philosophy that “scientism dictates a thoroughly Darwinian understanding of humans and of our evolution—biological and cultural,” one “that will strike many people as immoral as well as impious.”

He blames the pushback he (and Pinker) have encountered on the fact that the human race hasn’t evolved in such a way as to see that his views are correct (he and Pinker are presumably exceptions). Others, however, blame the pushback on contrary evidence. Following hard upon recent affirmations of the existence of free will and of doubts about materialist neuroscience and materialist psychiatry, this development is not entirely a surprise to trend-watchers. Rather, it is a confirmation.

First, New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier replied in “Crimes Against Humanities”, calling Pinker’s viewpoint a “reductionist racket.” He pointed out that

Reason is larger than science. Reason is not scientific; science is rational. Moreover, science is not all that is rational. Philosophy and literature and history and critical scholarship also espouse skepticism, open debate, formal precision (though not of the mathematical kind), and—at the higher reaches of humanistic labor—even empirical tests.

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