Though [the adherents of the New Atheism} built an identity around being rational, they often based their unbelief on dogmatic appeals to institutional authority, rather than careful skepticism. We saw this in the way Dawkins and others claimed that science had achieved an absolute, unquestionable truth with the theory of evolution. Rather than engage with critics like Meyer and Behe, they simply treated them as heretics to be cast out of polite society; science thus became an authoritarian enterprise committed to rooting out doubt.
In the years since, it has become increasingly obvious that science functions as much as an ideology as it does as a method of inquiry. The “scientific consensus” is now frequently invoked to settle not just scientific questions, but public-policy ones as well. Call this scientism. One of its most striking features is just how vacuous it is. Contemporary scientism doesn’t necessarily entail anything beyond uncritical deference to experts. This became clear enough over the course of the Covid pandemic. Within a month in early 2020, all right-thinking people went from ridiculing the idea that masks could stop the spread of a respiratory virus to believing it was of paramount importance to wear a mask at all times. This reversal wasn’t due to people weighing new evidence, but the empty assurance of the “scientific consensus.”
Other examples come from the debates around gender and trans medicine. Evolutionary biologist and New Atheism alumnus Colin Wright has argued that gender ideology contradicts the material reality of sex. In Wright’s telling, this irrational doctrine then leads to acts of medical abuse, such as the chemical castration of minors. No doubt this is true, but unlike the creationists Wright might have been confronting a generation ago, proponents of “gender-affirming care” don’t appeal to sources of authority other than science. On the contrary, they point to the fact that major US medical institutions have endorsed these practices. The “scientific consensus,” then, has proved capable of giving public legitimacy to even the most outré belief systems.
As a teenager, I had no way of foreseeing these developments. All I knew was that I didn’t want to live in a society controlled by Christian fundamentalists. To this day, I believe in the fragile ideal of a secular, pluralistic society. I used to think that scientific expertise could help sustain this ideal by combating religious dogma. However, it’s clear by now that those who purport to speak in the name of science aren’t as neutral and objective as I once assumed. Often, science’s would-be spokesmen are bent on imposing their own dogmas. In hindsight, I should have been more concerned about scientism becoming an official state ideology. Science has many impressive discoveries to its credit, but we shouldn’t let it think and make political decisions on our behalf. Nor ought we to uncritically adopt the metaphysical views of the majority of scientists as our own. The question of God’s existence, for instance, remains as open today as at any other time in human history.
Science is a methodology, and it produces no dogmas. It is simply a way of testing theories about the mechanics of the material world. It gets beyond its skis when it tries to explain more. Philosophy and Theology are not science; they are both attempts to make sense of human experience, and they have their own methodologies. And those methodologies, if they are to have any intellectual integrity, must take what science has learned about how the mechanical world works seriously, if not dogmatically.
What is scientific knowledge today often becomes obsolete tomorrow. That doesn't mean science is done in bad faith or has no legitimacy. In fact it's legitimacy lies in its ability to admit when it's wrong and to self correct. It was accepted science, for instance, in the 19th century that women were on average less intelligent than men because women's average brain size was smaller.
So the most important thing about science is that it is open to revision. The best scientists are those who know that they don't know, that what they know is dwarfed by what they don't. Does anybody believe that five hundred years from now that what is accepted today as the scientific consensus will be essentially the same? There will be continuity, but I think the discontinuities will be far more significant.
I admire Anthony Fauci. I think he is a scientist in the best sense, and that he played an indispensable, good-faith role during the pandemic. He'd be the first to admit that he doesn't know everything, that he wasn't right about everything because decisions in a crisis are based on sometimes incorrect and always incomplete information, but I'd argue that when the smoke cleared he was proved more often right than wrong.
I think that those on the political Right have made fools of themselves in trying to make him into some deep-state bogeyman. Their attacks on him personally are unfair, unwarranted, and unjustified. But Liberals need to understand that there is a lot of justifiable skepticism about the Scientific Clerisy, which, unfairly, Fauci has come to symbolize.
This skepticism is true for those on both the Right and the Left. RFK's campaign tends to attract the latter. Hardly anybody trusts the "system", and for good reason. But most of the people who work in it, especially those who are unelected like Fauci, perform an essential good-faith effort to make life in an enormously complex society sustainable.
Nevertheless, sane people have good reason to suspect that this clerisy and its reductive worldview needs to get some pushback from time to time. And they have good reason to mock those who genuflect to every edict it pronounces. When people, even Anthony Fauci, say, "The science tells us...", this does not mean that it is absolute truth. It is in most instances a statistical probability. So it's important enough that it needs to be taken seriously as part of one's deliberations about how to act, but not as a dogmatic pronouncement requiring unwavering obedience. That should be common sense.
The excerpt above is taken from an article about Intelligent Design and its relationship to Darwin's ideas about natural selection. The author argues that while Darwin's theory is a very powerful explanation for the mechanics of evolution, there are some anomalies that remain unexplained, and there are levels of complexity that are inadequately explained, and that perhaps can never be explained scientifically. That provides openings for philosophical or theological interpretation.
Intelligent design is not science, and it should not be taught as science. It's philosophy, and it's philosophy that, until about 150 years ago, would be consistent with what every philosophically literate person thought for at least the last 2500 years. But nobody knows that philosophy anymore, so philosophers that draw upon it seem unscientific, outlier cranks.
But Intelligent Design takes very seriously what science tells us while drawing on a broader range of human experiences and thinking that are not incompatible with it. But nobody knows that. Most people think that Intelligent design is fake science. But since we don't teach philosophy in our public high schools, we are educating our children to accept that the only legitimate way of knowing is scientific knowing, and this in turn creates a kind of ideological dogmatism that excludes other kinds of knowing that are far more important for the living of our lives. Any attempt to think about the meaning of history and the destiny of the human race is out of bounds--it's religion. But is it any more so than the atheistic scientism of Dawkins or Dennett?
So my point here is not to be anti-science, but rather to affirm that science explores a limited domain of knowledge, and that we must understand the limited role it should play in what should be the broader, deeper project of our becoming fully human. Science has done more harm than good when it acts as an ideology that colonizes or delegitimates other forms of knowing, especially forms of knowing that until relatively recently were accepted as essential for human flourishing. This reductive ideology, I've been arguing, has been the unintended negative consequence of the Baconian project, and it is core to the OS that runs the Techno-Capitalist Matrix.
Things are out of balance, perhaps fatally, if we don't find a way to rebalance.