The nub of Dawkins's consciousness- raising message is that to be an atheist is a "brave and splendid" aspiration. Belief in God is not only a delusion, he argues, but a "pernicious" one. On a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is certitude that God exists and 7 is certitude that God does not exist, Dawkins rates himself a 6: "I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there."
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Ravi suggested I look in the archives to find his views of scientism, and I read more than twenty posts, searching ``ravi, scientism''. I pulled the above out because I suspect it relates directly to the point, which seems to me now to be that scientism has become the religion of the modern age and had at least up until the rightwing take over, dominated debate, public policy decisions, and generally came to take the place of the old 19thC positivism that arose in the French Revolution as the reigning philosophy of a progressive modernist state.
So, we (left, progressive, materialists and generally friendly to the sciences---at least their results) are presented with an emergent and strange confrontation. The secular modernist state which is completely saturated with scientism at every level of action and policy, has been commandeered by a radical right, which in turn has wrecked havoc on the state regulatory and policy apparatus. This havoc takes the form of a destruction of a scientism based public policy apparatus with all its propaganda of impartiality, and has replaced it with a clearly righwing and openly ideological apparatus that makes no apologies about its bias.
But this form of destruction takes a distant second place to the wholesale destruction of government by old fashioned fraud and corruption. Most concerns over a total lack of even the pretense of a scientism impartiality or objectivity, simply vanishes when we see that so-called faith based public policy is just an old time traditional cover story for running some of the largest racketeering scams of all time---to the tune of billions.
So then, if and when the smoke clears from this appalling state of affairs, to put it bluntly, do we just elect Democrats and go back to the pseudo-science based public policy pretensions of state scientism?
Well, that's probably likely, and might even be a best case scenario. That's my gut feeling.
But let me switch gears, up a few notches, getting back to the above quote by Dawkins.
First of all my deepest breach with any form of belief in even the philosophical afterglow of deism, called being, or classical metaphysics, the study and analysis of being, was actually a mystical experience in the mountains, at night, after not seeing another person for two days. In other words it was what was usually considered a religious experience. It seemed like enlightenment. It would take too long to describe it and it would probably sound crazy, and it was in a way. Whatever else it was, it converted me to a level of materialism that was profoundly radical and probably forever--but who knows, things could always change.
Anyway, after that I began to read science and various scientific-philosophical essays like Dawkins above and realized that my materialism was far more radical than the vast majority of scientific writers I read. A few years later I went back and re-read some sections of Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms where in vol one he attempted to ground his philosophical discussion in its highest reaches of metaphysics, that is in relation to the German tradition, in terms of concepts of being. I found this to be the weakest link in the whole chain of reasonings, but it seemed to be needed. In other words in the strict pedagogy of the philosophical tradition he was writing for, some higher order of axiom level, some metaphysical level was needed, so he provided at least a sketch. Historically, these passages were written contemporaneous with the devolution of set theory and the great axiomatic project of Russell, Hilbert, Bernays, as critiqued by Godel. Much later still I tried to follow Godel's essays on these subjects, with his emphasis on a kind of backdoor rescue effort for idealism---and thought of Cassirer. In effect they were doing something very similar I think.
This odd journey actually bares on cosmology, by another back door. Einstein was an idealist, in the same sense that Cassirer and Godel were--and they were all roughly contemporary, and educated in the same traditions and even in the same general milieu---roughly my grandfather's age. They were all masters of mathematical physics, which is were they inherited their idealism.
How can I put this? I am an idealist in the same sense, but it is a form of entertainment, a kind of provisional interval, always to be checked by the crudest form of what I think of as materialism. I keep trying to think of an example of what I am talking about so that this post makes sense.
Here is a problem that I believe is the direct consequence of a modernist idealism as found in mathematical physics. In all the models of the universe, the big bang generates a ball or spherical universe. But from the best empirical observations over many decades, such a ball like superstructure does not exist. What has been found looks like a filamentary whisp of smoke. And it gets worse. This whispy archipelago of matter (clusters of superclusters) doesn't have the mass, the energy, or the internal gravitational fields to have ever been a coherent unity that has since origin evolved into its present(?) state, and from all appearances could never be made to return to such a state. We have a very big enigma.
So this is what I mean by materialism contemplating the idealism of being in its profoundest sleep (see Mann, Confessions of Felix Krull).
Going back down into the mire, I suspect that most of the presumptions that compose scientism are various consequences of an inherent idealism that accompanies many different scientific fields. Scientism seems little more than bastardizations of these idealisms. And, if this is so, or is as I think it might be, then the scientific communities need to undertake a kind of house cleaning which they are very reluctant to do. Well, because it is these idealisms that sell science to public policy makers, and therefore are critical propaganda for funding science, Duh. Well, because scientism is the public policy apparatus that makes science possible.
(BTW, I had to download, compile and install gv, ghostscript, acrobat just so I could surf the web in FireFox and quickly read a few articles to remind me of these themes. Gnome seems to have a font anti-alias problem. But never mind, it is just great to breeze along with two cpu's and dsl... I am finally getting to where I wanted to be all those months ago. )
-- CG