… An Inherently Meaningful Cosmos | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Gaertner gives a fine explanation of Barfield’s remarkable book on the scientific revolution, Saving the Appearances—whose title is a phrase long used by natural philosophers to indicate that their theories were attempts to find the simplest explanation consistent with what the senses told them. It was a modest approach, for it never claimed to have the final truth about the physical world. Barfield argues that the great scientific thinkers of the Renaissance cast aside this modesty and claimed that their theories not only saved the appearances but were completely true. Kepler and Galileo, Barfield says, “began to affirm that the heliocentric hypothesis not only saved the appearances, but was physically true.” This attitude has led today to an overweening certainty among some scientists (and even more among many non-scientists) that science has all the answers, including answers to metaphysical and humanistic questions. Such scientism is contradicted by all the Inklings, along with many other modern thinkers. As Jewell and Butynskyi (whose essay begins by tracing the development of this attitude in the nineteenth century) put it, “The Inklings called for scientism’s adherents to recognize that science can respect, even if it cannot explain, the mythic or metaphysical.”
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