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Scientism and its Challenge to Humanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

John Haldane*
Affiliation:
Dept of Philosophy, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9AJ, United Kingdom

Abstract

Viewed from the perspective of the nineteenth century there is little in the details of contemporary political life that would seem special. Tensions between great powers, ethnic and religious divisions, trade rivalries, economic recessions, currency crises, civil unrest, etc. are all part of the fabric of the modern world. Social life in the West has been marked by the dissolution of families and communities into voluntary and market associations of individuals; but while that was a distinctive feature of the twentieth century and has extended into the twenty-first, it is a continuation of trends well-established in previous times principally through industrialisation and urbanisation.

Type
Original Articles
Copyright
© 2012 The Author. New Blackfriars © 2012 The Dominican Council. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2012, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA

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References

1 Hawking, Stephen (and Leonard Mlodinow, ) The Grand Design (New York: Bantam, 2010) p. 5Google Scholar. I respond to Hawking in ‘Philosophy Lives’, First Things, January 2011.

2 Churchland, Patricia S., Braintrust: What Neuroscience tells us about Morality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) p. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man: and Selection in Relation to Sex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar see Chs 3 and 4: Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and Lower Animals.

4 ‘Darwin on the Descent of ManThe Edinburgh Review, Vol. 134, July 1871, pp. 195–235, p. 235.

5 Dobzhansky, Theodosius, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”, American Biology Teacher, Vol. 33, March 1973, pp. 125–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 The most recent calculations for these constants are published by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, see http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Constants/.

7 Stephen Jay Gould, ‘Darwinism Defined: The Difference between Fact and Theory.’Discover 8 January 1987, pp. 64–70.

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10 John Paul II, ‘Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: On Evolution’ 22 October 1996.

11 Gould, Stephen Jay, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York, Ballantine, 1999)Google Scholar see pp. 75–82. Following the British publication of Rocks of Ages Gould, I, and Hilary Rose discussed the idea of whether or not religion and science are in competition at any point. This was in the BBC series In Our Time and the programme can be heard at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p005479y.

12 ‘On Evolution’ op. cit.

13 For more on this issue see ‘Mind over Matter’ in Ch 2 of J.J.C. Smart and Haldane, J.J. Atheism and Theism Second Edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 96109Google Scholar.

14 Again see Smart and Haldane, Atheism and Theism, pp. 111–5.

15 Published in Wolstenholme, G. ed. Man and His Future (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1963)Google Scholar.

16 Haldane, JBS, Daedalus: or Science and the Future (London: Dutton, 1924)Google Scholar. It originated in a talk of the previous year given to the Cambridge ‘Heretics’. Haldane's ideas and views on these matters inspired three well-known literary creations in two of which he features in fictional guise: first, Aldous Huxley's, Antic Hay (London: Chatto & Windus, 1923)Google Scholar in which Haldane is portrayed as the physiologist Shearwater; second, Huxley's Brave New World whose eugenic society was based on Haldane's Daedalus speculations; and third, CS. Lewis's, Perelandra, the second in the Ransom Trilogy, in which the demonically possessed scientist Professor Weston represents aspects of Haldane, as Lewis saw him. JBS Haldane had his reply in two essays severely critical of Lewis: ‘Auld Hornie, FRS’The Modern Quarterly, Vol. 1, Autumn, 1946 [‘Auld Hornie’ is Scots for the Devil, and Haldane was a Fellow of the Royal Society]; and More Anti-Lewisite’ in Everything has a History (London: Allen & Unwin, 1951)Google Scholar. Lewis wrote, but never himself published, a response entitled ‘A Reply to Professor Haldane’ which later appeared (posthumously) in Hooper, W. ed., Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (London: Harvest Books, 1966)Google Scholar.

17 See Gould, Rocks of Ages, Ch 2, section 3: Coda and Segue.

18 For further discussion see ‘Science, Knowledge and Virtue’ Ch. 5 of Haldane, John, Practical Philosophy: Ethics, Society and Culture (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2009)Google Scholar.

19 See, for example, Mental Disorders and Genetics: The Ethical Context (London: Nuffield Council, 1998) available at http://www.nuffieldbioethics.org/mental-disorders.

20 Dilthey, Wilhelm, ‘The Development of Hermeneutics’ in Rickman, H.P. trans. & ed. Dilthey Selected Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) pp. 247–63Google Scholar.

21 For further discussion see ‘Rational and Other Animals’ Ch. 9 of Haldane, John, Reasonable Faith (London: Routledge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Descent, op. cit.

23 See, for example, Penn, Derek C., Holyoak, Keith J. and Povinelli, Daniel J.Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds’, Behavioural and Brain Sciences, Vol. 32, April 2008, pp. 109–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 For further elaboration and argument see Haldane, JohnKenny and Aquinas on the Metaphysics of Mind’ in Cottingham, J. and Hacker, P. (eds) Mind, Method, and Morality (Oxford: OUP) pp. 119139Google Scholar