Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

ID: “No more anti-scientific than Protestant sects were atheistic” – sociologist

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Steve Fuller, that sociologist who writes about ID as if getting things right mattered, has a new book coming out:

In this challenging and provocative book, Steve Fuller contends that our continuing faith in science in the face of its actual history is best understood as the secular residue of a religiously inspired belief in divine providence. Our faith in science is the promise of a life as it shall be, as science will make it one day. Just as men once put their faith in God’s activity in the world, so we now travel to a land promised by science. In Science, Fuller suggests that the two destinations might be the same one. 

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Science, argues Fuller, is now undergoing its own version of secularization. We are ceasing to trust science in its institutional forms, formulated by an anointed class of science priests, and instead we are witnessing the emergence of what Fuller calls “Protscience” – all sorts of people, from the New Age movement to anti-evolutionists, claiming scientific authority as their own. Fuller shows that these groups are no more anti-scientific than Protestant sects were atheistic.

Comments
From Dissent Over Descent:
What is intelligent design (ID) theory? A snide but not inaccurate answer is that it is scientifically-credentialed creationism. ID theorists do little to hide their typically Christian religious inspiration, but they are steeped more in science than in theology. Thus, they defend their position without reference to God or Scripture, but by the usual scientific appeals to reason and evidence.
In the conclusion, I propose a general strategy for ID to improve its position in the current debate with evolution.
While i cannot honestly say that I believe in a divine personal creator, no plausible alternative has yet been offered to justify the pursuit of science as a search for the ultimate systematic understanding of reality.
Mung
May 9, 2011
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