Science and Scientism:  An Interview with Henry Bauer

Henry Bauer needs no introduction to many Truth Barrier readers. He has been a chemist, professor of chemistry and science studies, and the Dean of Arts & Sciences at Virginia Tech. For someone with those credentials he has also been extraordinarily open-minded and outspoken on many topics his colleagues shy away from, as the titles of some of his books indicate: Beyond Velikovsky; The Enigma of Loch Ness; Science or Pseudoscience; Scientific Literacy and the Myth of Scientific Method; and The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory. His website is here and his blog is here.

In this interview he discusses the growth of blind faith in science, the dogmatism of “scientific consensus” and the extreme difficulties confronting scientists and researchers who don’t run with the herd, why he doesn’t think “Climategate” changed anyone’s mind, and the need to distinguish the truly anomalous and as-yet unexplained from mere crackpotism and hoaxes when it comes to phenomena like UFOs and Nessie.

JS: A few years ago I wrote that there are people who believe that Global Warming is happening and is a problem that needs to be addressed, and then there are people believe in Global Warming, for whom it is an apocalyptic secular religion. These people exhibit all the traits of a millenarian cult: the blind faith in the received Word, the predictions of the End Times, the dogmatism, the self-righteousness, the anathematizing of anyone who doubts or questions or fails to believe as they do.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I think I was describing an example of what you term “scientism.” Can you describe what you mean by scientism and how you think it came about?

HB: “Scientism” is science as religion; taking contemporary scientific consensus as unquestionably true. The historical roots are in the 19th century, perhaps in North-Western Europe, when science’s progressive triumphs were so notable: atomic theory proved; Periodic Table of the chemical elements; “organic” chemicals no different from inorganic chemicals; germ theory and pasteurization; natural selection as a plausible mechanism for evolution; electromagnetic theory.

Perhaps the material achievements of the Industrial Revolution contributed, because then as now most people think technology comes from applying science — most scholars of science and technology don’t accept that, but in any case technologists and theorists were in effective contact in groups like the Royal Society of London.

The notion that Darwin had unseated the Bible probably contributed to putting “Science” onto a religious pedestal for some people.

David Knight’s The Age of Science is an excellent, concise survey of how science gained a sort of hegemony by the end of the 19th century; he cites Huxley as a consciously and overtly proud preacher of Scientism, delivering “lay sermons for the Church Scientific.”  Read Interview

By John Strausbaugh