Science and scientism

(Correction: I consistently misspelled Adam Kotsko's name in the following.)

In a post a few days ago, Adam Kostko brings up the inability of science to answer basic philosophical questions, and suggests that this is a core of truth in the Intelligent Design movement (while being careful to reject ID pseudoscience):

Thus in the "Science vs. Intelligent Design" debate, I would say that both are right. First, yes, absolutely -- the advocates of Intelligent Design are not arguing in good faith, but are instead simply deploying this convenient philosophical position as a counteroffensive in the culture wars. But also, yes, absolutely -- science as calculative reason (i.e., Actually Existing Science) does not provide the answers to the questions that Intelligent Design is raising on the literal level. So the solution, in my opinion, is to leave the science curriculum the way it is and to add a rigorous philosophical program alongside it. Just insisting on "science"'s monopoly on reason over against "religion" is not going to cut it -- that's just question-begging, and it ignores the fact that "science" has factually been reduced to mere calculative wisdom. The more radical solution is to take the Intelligent Designers at their word and promote rigorous rational inquiry into ultimate questions -- which would be much more dangerous to religious fundamentalisms than any kind of knee-jerk scientism could ever dream of being.

I have to watch what I say here, because statements like this really, really irritate me. The reason is that I've spent my entire life trying carefully to avoid the kind of "knee-jerk scientism" he's talking about here, the insistence that science as "calculative reason" combined with observation can actually explain everything that is worth explaining, and I've known countless scientists who do too; there's nothing like attempting a career in science to show you the limits of what science can do. Yet none of this prevents "Science" from being accused of getting too big for its philosophical britches over and over and over.

For that matter, in this post and the comments Kostko seems to be assuming that Science currently overreaches by insisting on atheism, which wouldn't explain why I've known so many perfectly mainstream scientists who are not atheists, or why the talkorigins.org archive is loaded down with disclaimers about how evolutionary science is not atheistic. I've never heard of anyone raising the strawman argument that he brings up and rejects: "Because we have evidence that species evolved, God doesn't exist."


( Why does this happen? )