Anti-science philosophers

I recently attended a philosophy event on my campus called, "Rethinking the Humanity of Philosophy with Heidegger, Strauss, and Tocqueville." It sounded interesting, but I should have realized the nature of the crowd that would likely attend when I read that the speaker was a professor of philosophy at Brigham Young University.

The speaker discussed his work and explained how Alexis de Tocqueville, while not a philosopher, was often more in tune with the condition of the people of the time than either of the philosophers were, especially Heidegger. In fact, Heidegger very deliberately distanced himself from the application of philosophy to real life.

The whole talk was quite interesting despite my lack of exposure to either Strauss or Heidegger (I have read large portions of Tocqueville's Democracy in America). Then came the question and answer potion of the event. An elderly man (half the crowd was elderly despite the event being targeted at college students) raised his hand and said, I think as part of some train of thought involving Heidegger, "It's science that's the problem. We need to return to a pre-scientific age. I was at a talk and some scientists said that the big bang was the beginning of the universe. Then a Catholic boy asked, but what caused the big bang? An un-caused cause! I'm glad at least the Catholics are still thinking straight."

I was appalled. Science is the enemy? Return to an age before science? If that old man falls and breaks his hip, I promise that he will not go to the priest or the philosopher to get it fixed. I sat and thought furiously about this man's statements. Then I realized what was going on. Religious people want answers, and refuse to, or are afraid to, say "I don't know." Science doesn't know what caused the big bang, or even, to be fair, if the big bang really happened at all. All science has is evidence and the best explanation it can come up with so far to explain the evidence. Science willingly admits that it doesn't know all sorts of things, and it is the religious man who is unsatisfied by this and fills the gaps up with his god. A friend of mine echoed the old man's statements in a conversation online: "Where did the tiny ball of matter in the middle of the universe that was there before the big bang come from? The answer is, "Science doesn't know yet." Well until someone proves otherwise, I'm putting my stock in God."

This position is logically bankrupt for so many reasons, one of which is that there is no more reason to believe in big G god than there is to believe in the Norse god Odin. The fact that old philosophy man and young college girl have no problem with granting their god credit for the unexplainable, without any logical or rational reason for doing so, goes to show how deeply infected we are with religion and just how far we have to go to raise the consciousness of the educated, never mind the ignorant.