Science and scientism

Here is a great essay by Paul Cella at TCS about Stem Cells and Philosophy. [Via El Camino]

You can also find Paul Cella’s well-worth reading blog here. Especially good is his latest post on Chesterton and birth control. I just wish that he would activate his RSS feed since I had gotten out of the habit of reading his site since I look at most blog’s through an aggregator. Update: He now has an RSS feed.

Update: Small but Disorganized offers some other comments in reference to Paul Cella’s article, including.

Basically, the proponents of scientism believe that what we should do should be determined by science. In other words, if science can do it, we should do it. Just because we can do something, ought we do it? That question is a non-sequitur to many unconscious proponents of scientism.

However, I wonder how many true proponents of scientism there are? How many of those who favor fetal stem cell research in order to apply it to curing various diseases would also favor continued nuclear energy research, for example, in order to apply it to building safer and more numerous nuclear power reactors to cure our dependency on fossil fuels?

I think the difference in those two examples are this: fetal stem cell research only violates a human life… the life that gets destroyed for the sacred liturgy of research at the altar of scientism. Nuclear reactors are seen as a threat to humanity as a group… as a collective.

I think he hits the nail on the head when he compares the zeal for science when it comes to ESCR with the very contrained view of science when it comes to things such as nuclear power. Though I think it goes farther then to just things that might threaten humanity as a group. The outcry against DDT as a pesticide was mainly seen as a threat to some species. The fact that the banning of DDT has resulted in thousands of deaths due to malaria is not a concern to them in this case. Even scientism is restrained by whatever views the person holds. Their advocacy of science for science sake hits a wall when to comes to environmental causes. What is comes down to is that in reality everybody actually believes that philosophy should come before science, it is only what philosophies we should adhere to that are disagreed on. Even scientism is a philosophy and not a science and those who truly advocate a unstrained scientism are advocating the philosophy of scientism.