Monday, October 9, 2017

"Shortsighted humanists"

"... investing science with a prophetic and messianic role has not been the doing of science. Exact science, or rather its best cultivators, have never claimed that role. Exact physical science came into its own when during the seventeenth century it eliminated from its ken questions about existence, meaning, purpose, and the like. No wonder that sensitive physicists instinctively reject appeals from shortsighted humanists to do science in a so-called meaningful, or prophetic way. The cultivation of that meaningfulness is the business of the philosophy of being, or metaphysics, and of religion, if one wants to go even further. This is not to suggest that science is not full of philosophical presuppositions. But philosophy as such is not a direct part of the scientific strategy of exploring what can be known quantitatively about nature and existence."

~Stanley L. Jaki: in Chance or Reality and Other Essays.