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Scientific Humanism
“In the natural sciences,” said J. Robert Oppenheimer (one of the
developers of America’s atomic bomb) in a speech in 1954, “these are,
and have been, and are most surely likely to be heroic days.” Few would
doubt such a statement—especially in our time of great scientific
achievement. What great strides for mankind science has made! The World
Health Organization announced, for example, that we now have eradicated
smallpox worldwide. Add to that the successful assaults being made on
many other diseases (e.g.: polio, tuberculosis, etc.), and the story is
quite an impressive one. Consider, further, the many technological
advances that science has made possible—man on the Moon, communication
and transportation systems, agricultural expertise for the feeding of
the world population, genetic engineering, etc.—and one is likely to get
the idea that science can do
almost anything.
That is, in fact, what many have come to believe. This “do virtually
anything through science” attitude is exactly what scientific humanism
is all about. And no less an eminent humanist than Antony Flew of
England has asserted exactly that.
...as I construe the phrase scientific humanism the first word
indicates an approach to matters of fact while the second refers
primarily to fundamental criteria of evolution. To adopt such a
scientific approach unreservedly is to accept as ultimate in all
matters of fact and real existence the appeal to the evidence of
experience alone; a court subordinate to no higher authority, to be
overridden by no prejudice, however comfortable (Kurtz, 1973, p. 109, emp. added).
So there you have it. The scientific humanist appeals “to the evidence of
experience alone”
as a “court subject to no higher authority.” M.C. Otto, professor of
philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, viewed the matter in these
terms:
Dependence upon human effort more and more replaced dependence upon
God.... In proportion as men have ceased to lean upon God, they have
opened up undreamed-of resources for the satisfaction of the noblest
desires of which they are capable. Whenever men and women have been able
to act as if there were no divinity to shape human needs, and have
themselves assumed responsibility, they have discovered how to turn
their abilities to good account. Not believing in God has worked well. It has worked better than believing did.... I have for myself arrived at an affirmative faith in the non-existence of God (1940, pp. 322-325, emp. added).
Sir Julian Huxley, the famous British biologist and humanist, couched
his sentiments in these clear terms: “A scientifically based philosophy
enables us in the first place to cease tormenting ourselves with
questions that ought not to be asked, because they cannot be
answered—such as questions about the Cause or Creation or Ultimate or
Reality” (1965, p. 101). Corliss Lamont, the renowned humanist author,
framed the topic in these words:
The development, over the past four centuries, of a universally
reliable method for attaining knowledge is a far more important
achievement on the part of science than its discovery of any single
truth. For once men acquire a thoroughly dependable method of
truth-seeking, a method that can be applied to every phase of human life
and by anyone who faithfully conforms to certain directives, then they
have as a permanent possession an instrument of infinite power that will
serve them as long as mankind endures. Scientific method is such an
instrument.
Humanism believes that man has the power and potentiality of solving
problems successfully, relying primarily on reason and scientific method
to do so and to enlarge continually his knowledge of the truth.
Humanism believes in a naturalistic cosmology or metaphysics or
attitude toward the universe that rules out all forms of the
supernatural and that regards Nature as the totality of being and as a
constantly changing system of events which exists independently of any
mind or consciousness (1949, pp. 236-237,20,19, emp. in orig.).
Indeed, scientific humanism demands a refusal of anything with which
the sacrosanct scientific method cannot deal. Arlie J. Hoover correctly
assessed the situation when he wrote:
Reality in its fullest sense is extremely complex. It contains
intuitions of value and significance; it contains love, beauty, mystical
ecstasy, and intimations of divinity. Science does not possess
intellectual instruments with which to deal with all these subjective,
non-empirical aspects of reality. Consequently, it ignores them and
concentrates its attention upon those traits of the world that it could
deal with by means of arithmetic, geometry, and the various branches of
higher mathematics.
Why does the scientific method reject subjective factors, emotions,
feeling? Simply because it is not convenient! Because the method will
not allow you to deal with the immense complexity of reality. The
scientist, therefore, selects from the whole of experience only those
elements that can be weighed, measured, numbered, or which lend
themselves to mathematical treatment. By using this technique of
simplification and abstraction the scientist has succeeded to an
astonishing degree in understanding and dominating the physical
environment. This success was intoxicating and thus many scientists and
scientific philosophers jumped to the conclusion that their useful
abstraction from reality was reality itself.
This is a fallacy we call reductionism. You commit the reductive
fallacy when you select a portion of a Complex entity and say the whole
is merely that portion. You do this when you say things like: love is
nothing but sex, man is just an animal, music is nothing but sound
waves, art is nothing but color....
Someone has well said that science gives perfect answers to trivial
questions. This is largely true. When it gets down to the real serious
questions of life—origin, purpose, destiny, meaning, morality—science is
silent. Like a helpless computer it confesses: “I’m not programmed to
handle that kind of question....”
If science can’t handle morality, aesthetics, and religion that only
proves that the scientific method was reductive in the first place. Sir
Arthur Eddington once used a famous analogy to illustrate this
reductionism. He told of a fisherman who concluded from his fishing
experiences with a certain net that “no creature of the sea is less than
two inches long.” Now this disturbed many of his colleagues and they
demurred, pointing out that many sea creatures are under two inches and
they just slipped through the two-inch holes in the net. But the
ichthyologist was unmoved. “What my net can’t catch ain’t fish,” he
pontificated, and then he scornfully accused his critics of having
pre-scientific, medieval, metaphysical prejudices.
Scientific reductionism or “Scientism”—as it is often called—is similar
to this fisherman with the special net. Since the strict empirical
scientist can’t “catch” or “grasp” such qualities like freedom,
morality, aesthetics, mind, and God, he concludes that they don’t exist.
But they have just slipped through his net. They have been slipping
through his net all the way from Democritus to B.F. Skinner to Carl
Sagan (1981, 98[4]:6, emp. in orig.).
In addition to the three scientists mentioned by Dr. Hoover in the last
paragraph of the above quotation, many others could be added to the
list of scientific humanists. Such a list would include, for example,
Sir Francis Crick, Isaac Asimov, Linus Pauling, Preston Cloud and
literally hundreds of others, both living and dead. The list might look
like a “Who’s Who” in science. The names of many of these men are to be
found among those who signed either the
Humanist Manifesto I (1933) or the
Humanist Manifesto II
(1973). The fact that their signatures appear on these documents, or
the fact that they avidly support what these documents advocate, should
leave little doubt about the position taken by some of our leading men
of science.
Jesus spoke of such stupidity—being a scientific “giant,” but a spiritual “dwarf ”—when He said:
When ye see a cloud rising in the west, straightway ye say, “There
cometh a shower,” and so it cometh to pass. And when ye see a south wind
blowing ye say, “There will be a scorching heat,” and it cometh to
pass. Ye hypocrites, ye know how to interpret the face of the earth and
the heaven, but how is it that ye know not how to interpret this time?
(Luke 12:54-56).
Pity the people of Jesus’ day. They could read the scientific signs,
but were not able to (i.e., refused to) read the spiritual signs. While
they saw themselves as scientifically precocious, they were in reality
spiritually retarded. Paul, too, wrote of such men. He said:
For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is
written, He that taketh the wise in their craftiness: and again, The
Lord knoweth the reasonings of the wise, that they are vain. Wherefore
let no one glory in men (1 Corinthians 3:19-21).
Paul spoke of men who, “professing themselves to be wise...became fools” (Romans 1:22). He also said:
And even if our gospel is veiled, in them that perish; in whom the god
of this world hath blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that the light
of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should not dawn upon
them (2 Corinthians 4:3-4).
Pity the people of our day who fall into the same trap—and to whom
these words spoken of old still apply. While the scientific humanist is
busy measuring, weighing, numbering, calculating and classifying, he has
“left undone the weightier things of the law” (Matthew 23:23). He has
reduced everything to science—not because the evidence demands that he
do so, but because he “refuses to have god in his knowledge” (Romans
1:28). Professor D.C. Macintosh well stated the issues when he said:
“There is almost nothing upon the destruction of which leading humanists
seem so determined as any vital belief in God as a superhuman
intelligent Being worthy of human faith and fellowship” (1931, p. 55).
From the pages of their own
Manifesto come the words that document the truthfulness of professor Macintosh’s statement:
As in 1933, humanists still believe that traditional theism, especially
faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to love and care for
persons,...is an unproved and outmoded faith.... We believe, however,
that traditional dogmatic or authoritarian religions that place
revelation, God, ritual, or creed above human needs and experience do a
disservice to the human species (Humanist Manifesto II).
Sir Julian Huxley wrote:
This new idea-system, whose birth we of the mid-twentieth century are witnessing, I shall simply call humanism
because it can only be based on our understanding of man and his
environment.... It must be organized around the facts and ideas of
evolution, taking account of the discovery that man is part of a
comprehensive evolutionary process, and cannot avoid playing a decisive
role in it. ...it will have nothing to do with absolutes, including
absolute truth, absolute morality, absolute perfection and absolute
authority... (1964, pp. 73,74, emp. in orig.).
What a glowing description of the scientific humanist! What ever is to be accepted
must have to do only with man and his environment,
must be based on godless evolution, and
must
refuse any association with absolutes of any kind. The scientific
humanist suddenly finds himself involved in the sin of which he has
accused the believer in God—bigoted narrow-mindedness! In the words of
Sir Arthur Keith of Great Britain: “Therein lies the weakness of their
case, for the human mind craves for a solution of the great mystery and
is restless until it is satisfied as to its place in the great scheme of
the universe” (1928).
The scientific humanist needs to understand that altruistic love,
morality, ethics, rational thought, aesthetics, art, and a hundred other
things simply cannot be explained
solely on the basis of
scientific humanism. Humans will indeed “crave for a solution” and
remain “restless” if the only diet upon which they are able to feed is
the steady diet of naturalism, hedonism, uniformitarianism,
utilitarianism, and godless/purposeless atheistic evolution. Something
is missing in scientific humanism. That something is
God.
REFERENCES
Keith, Arthur (1928),
Westminister Gazette, June 7.
Kurtz, Paul, ed. (1973), “Scientific Humanism,”
The Humanist Alternative (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus).
Hoover, Arlie J. (1981), “Starving the Spirit,”
Firm Foundation, 98[4]:6, January 27.
Huxley, Julian (1964),
Essays of a Humanist (New York: Harper and Row).
Huxley, Julian (1965), “A Biologist Looks at Man,”
Fortune.
Lamont, Corliss (1949),
Humanism as a Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library).
Macintosh, D.C. (1931),
Humanism: Another Battle Line, ed. W.P. King (Nashville, TN).
Otto, M.C. (1940),
The Human Enterprise (New York: Crofts).
Originally published in Reason & Revelation, July 1981, 1[7]:25-27. Copyright © 1981 Apologetics Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
