I was struck [during the discussion with Bukharin] by the fact that this denial of the very existence of independent scientific thought came from a socialist theory which derived its tremendous persuasive power from its claim to scientific certainty. The scientific outlook appeared to have produced a mechanical conception of man and history in which there was no place for science itself. This conception denied altogether any intrinsic power to thought and thus denied also any grounds for claiming freedom of thought .
Michael Polanyi: The Tacit Dimension
As can be seen, in that quote, the idea that scientism, materialism and, in every case I've ever encountered those two together in one locus, atheism, would seem to inevitably have that effect. The only way that someone who holds that "scientific outlook" can avoid self-impeachment is by refusing to follow the consequences of their position to the end, the strategy of most of the current crop of philosophically incompetent atheists and even of many whose professional career is spent scribbling philosophy. When, early in his career, at the end of his Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgenstein ended by saying:
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen, What of man cannot speak, about that he must be silent, he was playing that kind of game, the favorite one of the logical positivists of declaring questions they didn't like out of bounds. Wittgenstein got over that crap fairly fast. But the habit of bullying people on that same kind of easily dismissed authority is annoyingly ineffective with the general public, what most of the scientific, philosophical new atheists find so aggravating, persists in the game of declaring questions and ideas out of bounds on a phony claim of incomprehensibility when everyone knows what those mean.
It is inevitable that in order for science to have any transcendent meaning as truth, the minds which are the only place in the universe where science exists, have to have properties that materialism cannot account for and can only deny.
One of the most interesting things about this, for me, is that it shows how ready atheist champions of scientism are to violate the very methods and standards of science they claim to be the foremost champions of. There is a passage in Hans Kung's Does God Exist, that is especially apropos of Michael Polanyi's experience because it begins with the Marxist reaction to Einstein's work and continues to show how, at the very center of science, scientists will jam their atheist ideology where, by the rules, it doesn't belong and no none bats an eyelash.
Advocates of dialectical materialism, in the light of their beliefs, had violently condemned Einstein's model of the universe at an early date as "idealistic," To them, it did not seem to confirm their dogma of the infinity and eternity of matter. When, at the end of the 1940s, the attempt was made in books on Christian apologtics actually to identify the point of time of the big bang with that of the divine creation of the world, even non-Marxists were disturbed. The German astronomer Otto Heckmann, who had played a leading part in the investigation of the expansion of the universe, tells us: "Some younger scientists were so upset by these theological trends that they resolved simply to block their cosmological source. They produced the 'steady state cosmology,' the cosmology of the expanding but nevertheless unchanging universe." But this theory of Bondi, Gold and Hoyle, of a stationary universe, had to assume a spontaneous generation of matter and seemed to be contradictory; after the discovery of cosmic microwave radiation and also quasars (1962-1963), the theory has scarcely any prospects of being accepted.
I will point out, at this time, that the Christian apologists weren't violating any of the ground rules of Christian apologetics, whatever you might think of their arguments. Christian apologists aren't barred from including science in their work, they were violating no rules of their game. In fact, given how one of the atheist slams against religion is that they don't include science in their method, you'd think they'd be happy to have them including some. But, no.
The scientists who created science with the primary motive of preventing anyone from believing in God the Creator were in basic violation of what are alleged to be the rules of science. If a religious scientist were caught doing what they did so flagrantly, they'd be pretty much booted out of the profession and made a laughing stock. Contrary to assertions that such an effort was over by the 1960s, it continued in the highest reaches of science into at least 1989 when John Maddox, the editor of that most prestigious science journal in English, Nature, railed against the big bang exactly for the implications that religious people took from it and, in fact, that obsession is still a continuing one that rules much of cosmology, multi-verse theory, various bouncing cosmologies that are created by the likes of Sean Carroll and Lawrence Krauss, who a dozen years ago, seemed to understand the problem of engaging in such stuff but who went on the atheist pro-tour since then. Though, considering what most of it is, it's more semi-pro.
And what you can say about cosmology being, as Hawking is quoted as saying, a religion for atheists, which resides securely within science, you can say exactly the same thing for sciences such as abiogensis and huge swaths of the behavioral sciences which is explicitly started as a refutation of the idea that God created life. Scientists have never much been troubled with that religio-idological use of science when it is materialistic-scientistic, atheists who are using it that way, no matter how bogus the results as a representation of observable reality. And so much of what was produced that way, unsurprisingly, turns out to be bogus.
In the two paragraphs after that in Kung's books, he goes over the not at all atheist unfriendly analysis of Hoimar von Ditfurth, after criticizing the religious use of science, he gives, what I think is a rather mild but rather definitive criticism of atheists who do what he just slammed religious people for doing.
On the other hand, on Ditfurth speaks very seriously to those natural scientists who argue the other way around and commit the same mistake as the theologians: "With every advance they made, with every new piece of knowledge acquired, it seemed to them increasingly improbable that there could be any transcendent reality at all hidden behind the facade of visible appearances."
I'll break in here and call out that phrase "it seemed TO THEM" for those who missed it.
What we said on principle about atheism is confirmed here: "If a scientist maintains an atheistic standpoint, he has a perfect and indisputable right to do so. No one has any means available to refute him. But if the man thinks he can substantiate his belief with his scientific insights, he is simply falling a victim - Nobel prizewinner or not - to the the fallacy here discussed." Wanting to stick only to what can be weighed and measured, even outside natural science, says Ditfurth, is a "professional neurosis" or an occupational disease of people who "think they have to convince themselves" that "there are no other fields of reality at all" outside the field of things that can be weighed and measured.
I would call your attention to the idea "he has a perfect and indisputable right to do so," to hold an atheistic standpoint. There is no room for that right or any other right within materialistic atheism, rights can't be weighed or measured. In order to assert that right, the atheist would have to, already, hold that there are other fields of reality, just as his claim that his science has the possibility of the transcendent quality of truth relies on there being more to our minds than chemical reactions that generate electrical currents in line with physical causation.
Ah, yes, rights. Rights that atheists both undermine the existence of even as they claim them for themselves. It is inevitable that, being a political blogger, that would interest me the most in this discussion. It is no accident, no coincidence and it had a high probability that the materialism of Nikolai Bukharin would lead to the result that it did for him and tens of millions of others. In the end, he was put on show-trial and executed by his fellow materialists, no rights being involved. His service to his materialism ended during Stalin's show trial purge, reportedly his last message to Stalin was "Koba, why do you need me to die" reportedly it was on his desk when Stalin died. Materialism is the god that failed him, even as so many materialists in the west signed onto that letter supporting Stalin's show trials. Quite a few of them were scientists. Polanyi's continued work was opposed by many of them.
