Livre d'Or

I've no objection to saying that the original exchange was here, by the way: I don't object to anyone referencing something in my public posts.

I am in violent agreement with you, as is Jerry Coyne in the posting on scientism that started the discussion:

Scientists are nearly always tentative in their conclusions. Lately I’ve been reading a bunch of papers on evolution, and was struck by how often conclusions are qualified by words like “this suggests that” or “this conclusion should be regarded as provisional”. Many papers suggest additional lines of research that could support or falsify their conclusions.

Nevertheless, as Coyne says

...it’s bogus to suggest that all scientific truth is ephemeral, for some truths of today will remain truths of tomorrow. A water molecule will still have two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom; AIDS will still be caused by a virus; the Earth will still go around the Sun. Although the concept of absolute and unchangeable truth is alien to science, we’ve found out a lot of things that are likely to remain “true” in that they’re unlikely to be overturned.

The stuff about the social sciences was badly phrased: what I probably should have said was that I think those sciences are more likely to undergo true paradigm shifts where the old ways are revealed as just the wrong way to think about things. Individual results within the research programmes of any science are prone to overthrow whether we're talking physics or sociology, but evolution is true.

Nevertheless, even if I'm wrong about the frequency with which paradigms shift, which I may be, I still agree Coyne's point that accusing someone of "scientism" is often a way of saying "how dare you ask us for evidence?". That's sort of accusation is often a prelude to one of the standard Bad Arguments about science which some religious people use when they feel threatened either by some scientific result, or the very idea that beliefs ought to be evidenced (whether scientifically or not: I don't take the view that all valid evidence is scientific evidence, or vice versa).

Coyne's an evolutionary biologist working in the USA, so his beef with "religion" is with the apparent[1] ontological claims of Christianity, not with the praxis of Reform Judaism, but as far as those claims go, he is right: science is better at telling us what is out there than "religion". As I said on the original thread on my blog, even those people who think that their own particular "other ways of knowing" are valid when they use them to "know" the truth of their religious beliefs would demand some form of empirical evidence before accepting someone else's (the point is Chris Hallquist's, in the final paragraph of that post).

[1] "apparent" because I accept the views of sociologists and anthropologists (ha!) that there's some kind of emotivism behind a lot of this stuff: when a person says that the Holy Spirit "proceeds from the Father and the Son", they mean "Hurrah for us and boo to the Orthodox team" more often than they mean what the statement seems to mean, if indeed it means anything at all. Still, I take Blackburn's point that, as Hume says, "The usual course of men’s conduct belies their words, and shows, that their assent in these matters is some unaccountable operation of the mind between disbelief and conviction, but approaching much nearer to the former than to the latter": approaching, but not reaching. You might enjoy Blackburn's Religion and Respect, which starts with him wondering whether he should put on a hat at a Jewish Sabbath meal and goes into the differences between ontological and expressive religion.