Friday, June 05, 2009

A scientist on scientism ...

... C. S. Lewis: Science and Scientism. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Richard Dawkins, author of The Blind Watchmaker, is the very ideal of a modern materialist reductionist. It has been noted above that the word "reductionism" serves the purpose today that "scientism" played in the 1940s. Let me attempt to give just a flavor of Dawkins' worldview. For example, he describes love as "a product of highly complicated... nervous equipment or computing equipment of some sort." ... When asked if such a worldview is depressing, Dawkins responds "I don't feel depressed about it. But if somebody does, that's their problem. Maybe the logic is deeply pessimistic, the universe is bleak, cold and empty. But so what?"

7 comments:

  1. WWKD?

    (What Would Kafka Do?)

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  2. Anonymous10:00 AM

    Interesting - it suggest what psychologists call 'shallowness of affect' (a sociopathic trait) - they don't really feel anything deeply, neither joy nor misery, everything is shallow because the sociopathic self is insubstantial. They can't understand exalted or dejected states - for example, one sociopath i knew said when people cry at funerals it's the equivalent of a child stamping his feet because mommy won't give him a sweet - self-indulgence - mourners are apparently only crying because THEY feel bad, they feel nothing for the dead person. i was flabbergasted by this - there was no response - except to think "feller, you are a sociopath."

    Just as my sociopath couldn't understand the concept of grief, so Dawkins can't understand anything beyond what a machine would 'feel'. He's like a retarded version of the Termminator: at least at the end of Terminator 2, Arnie can say: "I know why you cry now. But I could never do this" - Dawkins wouldn't even get to the first part of this statement, or perhaps he'd say "we cry when we experience pain, pain is our body telling us we are being damaged." Which misses the point. Maybe Dawkins is a prototype for the Terminator, a rough sketch with limited circuitry. It says a lot for our machine age that people take him seriously. But then sociopaths are often persuasive.

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  3. Elberry, that's an interesting idea that I hadn't considered before. But it gets at the root of why logical positivism, or ultra-materialism, doesn't really work for me: its lack of engagement with the immaterial, which in a way is parallel to a sociopath's inability to feel empathy.

    It's not only Dawkins, of course, although he the current cultural loudmouth about this viewpoint. I hear similar things from lots of neuroscience, which wants to reduce every human experience to chemistry: as though itself were a Pavlovian response to an external programmed stimulus.

    Of course, that is the materialist position about human spirituality and empathy and emotion in general. They often stumble on the point, however, about how and why the programming, if it is such, developed the way it did.

    LOL the veriftication word today is: buddi

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  4. On the other hand, this essay has some real problems with its base-level thinking, and assumptions; as Lewis himself often did, as this essay points out. Schaeffer verges on endorsing intelligent design at one point, although he avoids saying so. I for one have never been particularly enamored of Lewis; he was never as sharp a thinker as many of his fans think he was. Schaeffer points out several times that Lewis' writings often reveal a reaction against his former atheism, almost an apologia; that's exactly correct. What Shaeffer doesn't point out, however, is that Lewis continues, after his conversion. to make unfounded assertions based on received opinion, as he had done in his atheist period; so all that has really changed is what Lewis asserts, while his habit of making strong assertions without a lot to back them up continued unabated. And that's precisely what has often undermined Lewis' positions, in my readings of him.

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  5. Anonymous11:11 AM

    i dislike Lewis intensely. He has no interest in what is true; only in persuading people. 'Mere Christianity' is the worst: it's full of sophistry, rhetorical sleight-of-hand, all in this unbearably pompous schoolmaster's tone "now, are we all sitting comfortably?" Christianity for Dummies, someone once called it.

    He was apparently thoroughly trounced & discomfited by Wittgenstein's student, Elizabeth Anscombe, in an Oxford debate. She knew how to think; Lewis didn't.

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  6. LOL I didn't know about the Anscombe encounter. But that sounds exactly right.

    What comes to mind at the moment is a parallel in lit crit arguments, in which I often find myself in Anscombe's position; namely, whenever I seem to get into an argument in which I question the value of fashion-driven criticism, or hipness, or find myself arguing against fans of whatever. Examples range from debates on C. McCarthy to Language poetry. LOL I have mixed feelings about engaging with Lewis-style non-logic in these circumstances, because you almost never actually get anyone to THINK clearly. You know?

    Which leads me to wonder if perhaps Lewis' lack of thinking isn't precisely why he's more popular as a writer in the USA by far than he is in Britain. The US seems to be fertile ground for religious extremism, along with a long record of anti-intellectualism; of course, those are often found together. But maybe that's why Lewis', as you put, lack of interest in what's true, only what he can persuade you of, has made him more popular in the US. I'm not sure I'm saying this very well; it's something I've long felt to be true, and your comments are helping me articulate it better, and I'm still not sure I'm saying it well.

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  7. Well, let me come to the defense of Lewis. First, The Allegory of Love, The Discarded Image, A Preface to Paradise Lost and An Experiment in Criticism are important works of literary scholarship. Schaeffer notwithstanding Till We Have Faces is a great book, probably Lewis's masterpiece. I also think Lewis is a better dialectician than you are willing to give him credit for - next to Richard Dawkins he reads like Plato. But finally, he was a pparently a great and beloved teacher and one story alone is enough to demonstrate this. He persuaded one of those students, Kenneth Tynan, not to commit suicide. In doing this he never once brought into the discussion his Christian faith. He simply explained to Tynan that he was very intelligent and talented young man who would be depriving the world of something valuable if he didn't get on with the work he was capable of doing. Tynan always thought well of Lewis and always spoke well of him and thought of him often in his final days.

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