Professor Schaff has been engaged in conversation with our Keloland colleague Bob Schwartz on the question of science and the problem of abortion. I recommend this conversation to our readers, and especially Jon's original post. This is good blogging.
I agree with Professor Schaff on all the substantive points regarding the issue, but I am skeptical of his critique of "scientism." This seems to me to be an attempt to draw prophylactic boundaries around "science," lest the guys in lab coats should get into the library or the chapel and ruin the carpet. But the fact that Jon has no hesitation to call upon science to support his arguments on abortion suggests that the boundaries are not always so useful.
The word "science" means a lot of things. Most specifically it means the modern method of forming a hypothesis and testing it by experiments. This might be the most spectacularly successful method in the long history of methods. But it is not often of much direct use in practical questions. More generally, science means any thinking that discovers general principles in some subject matter and/or proceeds from the same. I don't think that Jon's reasoning on abortion is any less scientific, or "scientistic," than Al Gore's reasoning (if one can call it that) on global warming.
I take Aristotle as my guide here (after all, he is in good with the Church). It is useful to distinguish the questions that are appropriate to each science (how fast it moves is physics), and it is useful to distinguish practical questions, which turn on changing circumstances, from theoretical questions, which aim at more permanent truths.
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