Scientism 19th Century

• Scientism is the notion that natural science comprises the most authoritative worldview or form of human knowledge, and that it is superior to all other interpretations of life.

Hammer

• Scientism is the active positioning of one’s own claims in relation to the manifestations of any academic scientific discipline, including, but not limited to, the use of technical devices, scientific terminology, mathematical calculations, theories, references and stylistic features – without, however, the use of methods generally approved within the scientific community, and without subsequent social acceptance of these manifestations by the mainstream of the scientific community through e.g. peer reviewed publication in academic journals.

Friedrich Hayek

• was an economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought. He is considered to be one of the most important economists and political philosophers of the twentieth century, winning the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974

Two Pejorative Directions

• To indicate the improper usage of science or scientific claims in contexts where science might not apply, such as when the topic is perceived to be beyond the scope of scientific inquiry; or there is insufficient empirical evidence to justify scientific conclusions. In this case it is a counter-argument to appeals to scientific authority.

• To refer to "the belief that the methods of natural science, or the categories and things recognized in natural science, form the only proper elements in any philosophical or other inquiry," with a concomitant "elimination of the psychological dimensions of experience."

Fields of knowledge

• The term is also used to highlight the possible dangers of lapses towards excessive reductionism. in all fields of human know

• expresses a position critical of positivism.

• cultural "rationalization" of the modern West

Sociologist

• Max Weberwas a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research and the discipline of sociology itself.

• Jürgen HabermasGerman sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'

Gregory R. Peterson

two main broad themes:• It is used to criticize a totalizing view

of science as if it were capable of describing all reality and knowledge, or as if it were the only true way to acquire knowledge about reality and the nature of things.

• It is used to denote a border-crossing violation in which the theories and methods of one (scientific) discipline are inappropriately applied to another (scientific or non-scientific) discipline and its domain.

Mikael Stenmark• Dean of the Faculty of Theology since 2008 and

Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Department of Theology, Uppsala University, Sweden. He has published papers in the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of science, and environmental ethics and on science-religion issues. Stenmark is the author of "Rationality in Science, Religion and Everyday Life" (1995), for which he was awarded The John Templeton Foundation Prize for Outstanding Books in Theology and the Natural Sciences in 1996.

• In the Encyclopedia of science and religion, he writes that, while the doctrines that are described as scientism have many possible forms and varying degrees of ambition, they share the idea that the boundaries of science (that is, typically the natural sciences) could and should be expanded so that something that has not been previously considered as a subject pertinent to science can now be understood as part of science (usually with science becoming the sole or the main arbiter regarding this area or dimension)

Relevance to the science and religion debate

• Gregory R. Peterson says that "for many theologians and philosophers, scientism is among the greatest of intellectual sins“

• described scientism as being, from a psychological point of view, a form of belief

• Seyyed Hossein Nasrmany will accept the ideology of modern science, not as "simple ordinary science", but as a replacement for religion.

Philosophy of science

• Paul Feyerabend

characterizes science as "an essentially anarchic enterprise and argues emphatically that science merits no exclusive monopoly over "dealing in knowledge" and that scientists have never operated within a distinct and narrowly self-defined tradition. He depicts the process of contemporary scientific education as a mild form of indoctrination, aimed at "making the history of science duller, simpler, more uniform, more 'objective' and more easily accessible to treatment by strict and unchanging rule

“Science can stand on its own feet and does not need any help from rationalists, secular humanists, Marxists and similar religious movements; and ... non-scientific cultures, procedures and assumptions can also stand on their own feet and should be allowed to do so ... Science must be protected from ideologies; and societies, especially democratic societies, must be protected from science... In a democracy scientific institutions, research programmers, and suggestions must therefore be subjected to public control, there must be a separation of state and science just as there is a separation between state and religious institutions, and science should be taught as one view among many and not as the one and only road to truth and reality.”

— Feyerabend, Against Method, p.viii

Rationalization and modernity• process whereby an increasing

number of social actions become based on considerations of teleological efficiency or calculation rather than on motivations derived from morality, emotion, custom, or tradition.