By Mary Midgley
What's the position of scientists in society? What should still we expect after they speak about greater than simply technological know-how? Mary Midgley discusses the excessive religious goals which are likely to assemble round the idea of technology.
Read or Download Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning PDF
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Additional info for Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning
Example text
Chemists can indeed be partial, but their partiality is not usually a matter of favouring carbon over hydrogen or one protein over another. Mostly, it springs from some outside social or personal consideration. In metaphysics, by contrast, we really may have direct preferences about such things as cosmic purpose, or how causality works, or the relation of mind to body. What these authors hope to do is to import into metaphysics the kind of impartiality that comes naturally in physical science, simply by handling it with scientific methods.
And these world-pictures are themselves not value-free; they are always more or less dramatized. THE CONCEPTUAL NECESSITY OF DRAMA If examples of this insidious crypto-dramatization are wanted, the apocalyptic fantasies already mentioned might serve. But the habit is far more widespread. Thinkers like Monod himself who suppose themselves to be exposing it are as subject to it as anybody else. They are only dealing in different dramas. The trouble is not just that they are too feeble to be properly impartial, and need more heroism to complete the job—perhaps more cold baths, or practice in the martial arts…?
This is one of countless passages which show how traditional teleological thinking shapes the whole project of this book, though the authors constantly cover it with a façade of science. IS IT NEEDED? What is the real standing of the Anthropic Principle? Though it is certainly seriously intended, many physicists dismiss it pretty sharply. Heinz Pagels, for instance, speaks for many in dropping it as ‘not subject to experimental falsification’ and so no true scientific theory. Most physicists and astrophysicists, he says, get on perfectly well by ignoring it: The influence of the anthropic principle on the development of contemporary cosmological models has been sterile; it has explained nothing, and it has even had a negative influence, as evidenced by the fact that the value of certain constants, such as the ratio of photons to nuclear particles, for which anthropic reasoning was once invoked as an explanation, can now be explained by new physical laws… No knowledge has been gained by the adoption of anthropic reasoning.