Scientism is the belief that the scientific method has no (or few) limits and can successfully be applied to almost all domains and provides an explanation for everything. It is also used to refer to the idea that others worship science and its results.

Here’s the link.

In Conservapedia, “scientism” is listed as one of the main causes of “atheism.”

But reductionism, or the “explanatory arrow pointing downward” is not necessarily bad. That is, if one understands the basics of how things fit together.

The basis of calculus is that everything is made up of lesser things. Mountains consist of trillions of tiny crystals, big changes are made up of little changes, high speeds are made up of little accelerations, and so on. “Reducing” sociology to biology to biochemistry to chemistry to physics looks at how the big things are built of smaller bits. But more of them.

The trick is to understand the relationships between the levels of detail, and the degrees of abstraction. To say that a mind is “merely” a bunch of atomic interactions is denigrating the understanding we have of how assemblies are necessarily more than the sum of the parts. Assemblies are also the sum of the interactions between the parts. “God is in the details” and increasing complexity is the unavoidable result of self-replicating systems.

These levels of understanding are what we need to find a folksy way to teach.

“For instance, we could not have predicted the Internet in 1920.”

1920’s? Futurists in the 1980’s couldn’t predict the Internet as we now know it, given that they knew of Arpanet. Even hard science fiction in the early 1990’s (Niven, Pournelle, Baer) portrayed a future with no inkling of the power of instant information and ubiquitous communication that we now take for granted.

The charge from the school district — Wizardry!

http://www.tampabays10.com/news/local/article.aspx?storyid=79533