Blogotional

The Heritage Foundation publishes a lecture by John G. West on the effects of materialism on our culture, society and governance. He opens this way:

"An age of science is necessarily an age of material­ism," wrote Hugh Elliot early in the last century. "Ours is a scientific age, and it may be said with truth that we are all materialists now."[1]

One does not have to look far to discover the con­tinued accuracy of Elliot's assessment. Scientific materialism--the claim that everything in the uni­verse can be fully explained by science as the prod­ucts of unintelligent matter and energy--has become the operating assumption for much of American politics and culture. We are repeatedly told today that our behaviors, our emotions, even our moral and religious longings are reducible to some combination of physical processes interacting with our environment.

In 1943, British writer C. S. Lewis wrote propheti­cally about the dangers of scientific materialism in a small, penetrating volume titled The Abolition of Man. There Lewis warned that "if man chooses to treat him­self as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite...in the person of his dehumanized Conditioners."[2]

West then goes on to look at several implications of the encroachment of materialism into our public discourse.

• Technocracy
• Utopianism
• Dehumanization (a hearty Blogotional AMEN to the that!)
• Relativism
• Stifling Free Speech

It is in this last effect/section that West winds up to the heart of the matter.

A final influence of scientific materialism on public policy has been the suppressing of free speech and debate over the public policy impli­cations of science. This is surely one of the most striking ironies of the effort to enlist scientific mate­rialism to reform society.

In their own minds, proponents of scientific materialism were the defenders of enlightenment against superstition and rational debate against unreasoning dogmatism, but the rhetoric they employed against their opponents is often far from conducive to open debate. The repeated insistence that scientists know best and, thus, politicians and the public should blindly accept the policy views of scientists did not encourage critical scrutiny of sci­entific claims made in politics.

Even less conducive to genuine debate was the frequent playing of the religion card in policy dis­putes involving science. With the help of sympa­thetic journalists, proponents of scientific materialism portrayed every policy dispute as a bat­tle pitting the enlightened forces of science against bigoted religious extremists. Promoters of eugenics heaped scorn on Catholic and fundamentalist critics of forced sterilization. Advocates of Kinsey-style sex education demonized parents who raised objections as Bible-thumpers who were conspiring against democracy. Today, defenders of a Darwin-only biol­ogy curriculum similarly accuse their opponents of trying to insert the Biblical creation story into sci­ence classes, even when such claims are inaccurate.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of these attempts to frame policy disputes in terms of reli­gion versus science is the attempt to shift the focus from the content of the debates to the supposed motives of those who oppose any claim made in the name of science. Instead of addressing the policy arguments raised by critics of sex education or Dar­win-only science education, defenders of scientific materialism try to make the religious beliefs of their opponents the central issue, arguing that critics' real or perceived religious motivations somehow dis­qualify them from being active participants in the public square.

This is an excellent piece and I recommend it to anyone interested in science, religion, and public policy. Read the whole thing.

There are just two brief comments that I want to make. The first is one that I have made over and over and over again. The opening quotation, that science demands materialism is something with which I whole-heartedly disagree. Within the physical systems that science studies, materialism is necessary in order to conduct those studies. That is to say, we can only, because of the limitations of our senses, investigate the material, but that does not mean there is no immaterial or super-natural. Elliot's insistence is based on something other than science.

For this reason, I actually like the formulation used in this piece of distinguishing science (an activity or field of study) from materialism (a philosophical school of thought). Under this formulation, I can do science without the de facto acceptance of the philosophical stance. What is difficult, of course, is when being trained to do science, if one fails to take that philosophical stance, one's opportunities are often limited, but that is politics, not science.

Which brings me to the second point I want to make. West's last "effect" - the stifling of free speech is one that shames the scientific community on a daily basis - it is nothing short of SHAMEFUL. It is a tactic robbed from the admittedly misguided religious institutions from prior to the Reformation and Enlightenment and in adopting that tactic, the scientific community behaves in exactly the same fashion as what it pretends to oppose.

Which, by the way, may be the best evidence of our sinful nature I have ever encountered. And once one makes that realization, the gospel makes a whole bunch of sense.

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