I’m not sure who writes the website The Barefoot Bum (he appears to be named “Larry” in his website cartoon), but I’m sorry I didn’t run across it a while back, for he’s written two great posts in a row (the other one, which I may discuss later, is on the dreadful dialogue between Gary Gutting and Alvin Plantinga that recently appeared in The New York Times).

The Bum’s first piece, “The limits of science,” is a critique of a paper I’ve written about—attack on New Atheism published by Massimo Pigliucci.

Pigliucci’s paper, which appeared in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, is called “New Atheism and the scientistic turn in the atheism movement” (free download), and it reprises the author’s familiar gripes about New Atheism: people like Dawkins and Harris are philosophically unsophisticated and haven’t grappled with the best arguments for and against theism by philosophers (Pigliucci even claims that “it seems clear to me that most of the New Atheists [except for the professional philosophers among them] pontificate about philosophy very likely without having read a single professional paper in that field”); and that we define science unduly broadly, especially when seeing religious claims as empirical hypotheses open to examination by reason and observation (and to dismissal if they can’t be so adjuciated).  By broadening the definition of science to something like “investigating any claims about reality using reason, observation, testing, and the attitude of doubt and falsifiability,” Pigliucci claims that we’re engaging in the Deadly Sin of Scientism. (Pigliucci’s own definition of science is the activities engaged in by professional scientists, while I—and apparently Larry—see “science” as a method of finding things out that can in principle be used by anyone.)

At any rate, The Barefoot Bum’s critique is both better reasoned and more temperate than mine, and I’d recommend your reading his whole piece.   As I’m still preoccupied with other stuff (I finished the first draft of my book and have begun revising it), I’ll just post some of what “Larry” says for you to ponder. As you might suspect, I agree with much of it:

Pigliucci’s definition [of science] is too narrow in that we can easily conceive of science being done without many of the institutional characteristics he lists. How general must a theory be to be “scientific”? Is, for example, forensic science really a science? Forensic science seeks to discover what actually happened at a particular point in time, almost the exact opposite of the construction of a general theory about the world. If forensic science is not a science, what is it? Do we need systematic peer review — in something other than the trivial, over-broad sense that all communication is received and modified by listeners — for an endeavor to be scientific? Must we have public or private funding, again in other than the trivial sense that everything is in some sense economic? For decades, science was self-financed, pursued by people with their own income from other sources. Pigliucci’s definition of “science” is as absurd as defining “dining” as something being done in a restaurant using food, which would include eating at McDonalds and exclude my friend, who is an excellent amateur cook, preparing dinner at home.

He claims as well that Pigliucci is being philosophically inconsistent by insisting on a narrow definition of “science” while taking a very broad and loose view of the term “fact”:

Pigliucci argues that the word “fact” connotes “too heterogeneous a category” for science to encompass. Pigliucci asserts a broad definition of “facts,” which includes all statements that one cannot successfully deny; Pigliucci asserts, for example, that one cannot, for example, deny that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle (on a plane) add up to 180° (150). But this argument can be read as simply the tendency of speakers of natural languages to apply the same word to different categories. Pigliucci’s example is telling: Euclidean geometry is not a fact even in the loosest empirical sense of a fact as a true statement about the world. Instead, Euclidean geometry is a mathematical formalism; to determine whether or not Euclidean geometry accurately describes the real world, we need to actually observe and measure angles. And we find that often, Euclidean geometry does not accurate describe the world, as when we draw triangles on a sphere or the Reimann surfaces near a large mass. We can take the amorphous mass of meanings that constitute the lexicographical content of “fact” and easily divide them into distinct* categories: common observation, deductive certainty, settled scientific theories, social totems, and confident assertions. There is no need to hold that broadening the definition of “science” requires that the broader definition include every lexicographical denotation of “fact.”

I’ve thought a lot about mathematics and am coming around to the view that it doesn’t reveal truths about the world, but simply the inevitable consequences, worked out by logic of a set of axioms. That is why we speak of “proof” in mathematics but not in science. Fermat’s Last Theorem was “proven,” but nobody says “We’ve proved evolution,” for something could always surface that showed evolution to be wrong. (I don’t, by the way, anticipate that!)

Finally, “Larry,” constructs his own definition of science, which I like quite a bit. Go over to his site to see it, but in summary it incorporates investigations limited to the real world, the formation of theories about phenomena, the insistence that those theories be falsifiable through general agreement by rational people, and the idea theories should be parsimonious, invoking no more assumptions or entities than necessary to explain the observations. This definition of “science,” of course, includes plumbing and car mechanics (“my hypothesis is that there’s a bad fuse in the electrical system”). To me it’s not so important what the dictionary says as that there is methodology held in common by plumbers and molecular biologists.

In the end, The Barefoot Bum applies his definition to religion, showing that it is in principle “scientific” because it makes empirical claims about the world, but then doesn’t follow the scientific method to examine those claims. His paragraph on this is a marvel of concision:

This definition seems to exclude a lot of religious thought as either unscientific or scientifically false. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins proposes the “God Hypothesis.” Dawkins asks: what happens when we try to construct religious thought as science, broadly conceived? Applying the criteria, we hypothesize that God is real, with real properties. Second, we make a logically connected theory that includes God and His properties. Third, we make this theory falsifiable, it entails logically possible facts which would disprove the theory. Fourth, we demand commonly observable facts that would disprove the theory. If we do so, then we find that either a real God has properties that are entirely different than the properties we normally ascribe to persons; a theory of God compatible with the commonly observable facts requires a God who is, unlike ordinary human persons, not only mechanical and sphexish. Reject any of the criteria, and you concede the argument by contradiction, absurdity, or vacuity. If God is not real, you’re already an atheist. If you cannot make a logically connected theory, you are just babbling. If your theory cannot be falsified, then there’s no way of telling if it’s true or false. If your theory is not falsifiable by commonly observable facts, you are unjustifiably claiming private knowledge. And if your theory is observationally identical to a universe with no personal God, then you’re again already an atheist; a God who makes no difference is no God at all. The only remaining question is whether some people would find this analysis useful, and I know many people who, applying this analysis, have abandoned their religion.

I suspect Pigliucci won’t be happy with Larry’s conclusion: that all empirical claims are ultimately totally within the purview of science. That is, there are no “ways of knowing” other than through science, though there are ways of understanding that fall outside science’s bailiwick:

Does this definition include or exclude anything obviously objectionable? We seem to admit lawyering, but lawyers are not obviously unscientific. This definition excludes pure mathematics (even if a lot of mathematicians are Platonists), but I suspect most mathematicians would not object to being placed outside the boundaries of science. This definition definitely excludes philosophy; I do not know, however, whether Pigliucci would be encouraged or enraged by such exclusion.

Finally, the question remains: does this definition of science “encompass all aspects of human knowledge and understanding”? It certainly does not encompass all aspects of human understanding (even if the definition of “understanding” is so broad as to render the term meaningless). As noted above, it does not include mathematics, literature, or even philosophy, which are uncontroversially parts of human understanding. Perhaps, however, it does encompass all knowledge; it is perhaps the case that anything that legitimately deserves the name “knowledge” really must be scientific, in the sense described above. But I need not answer this question to dispose of Pigliucci’s case; it is enough to find that this broad definition of science is useful and largely unproblematic.

The hallmark of New Atheism is its insistence on two things: seeing religious dogma as comprising real claims about what is true in the universe—as hypotheses—and regarding “faith” as exactly the wrong way to assess those claims. In contrast, the hallmark of New Theology is to desperately elude that New Atheist stance by rendering religious claims immune to empirical examination and reason. Plantinga, as Larry shows in his other article, gets around New Atheism by insisting that the Christian God is simply obvious to anyone who looks.