Explain Paleys Argument for the Existence of - amazonia.fiocruz.br

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Philosophy of Religion

Read the passage and answer the question based on it. Scientism has left humanity in our technical mastery of inanimate nature, but improvised us in our quest for an answer to the riddle of the universe and of our existence in link. Scientism has done worse than that with respect to our status as social beings, that is, to our life with our fellow human beings. The quest for the technical mastery of social life, comparable to our mastery over nature, did not find scientism at a loss for an answer: reason suggested that physical nature and social life were fundamentally alike and therefore proposed identical methods for their domination.

Since reason in the form of causality reveals itself most plainly in nature, nature became the model for the social world and the natural sciences the image of what the social sciences one day would be. According to scientism, there was only one truth, the truth of science, and by knowing it, humanity would know all. This was, however, a fallacious argument, its universal acceptance initiated an intellectual movement and a political technique which retarded, rather than furthered, human mastery of the social world.

The analogy between the natural and social worlds is mistaken for two reasons.

On the one hand human action is unable to model the social world with the same degree of technical perfection that is possible in the natural world. On the other hand, the very notion that physical nature is the embodiment of reason from which the analogy between natural and social worlds derives, is invalidated by modern scientific thought itself.

Can you answer this question?

Physical nature, as seen by the practitioner of science consists of a multitude of isolated facts over which human action has complete control. We know that water boils at a temperature of degrees Fahrenheit and, by exposing water to this temperature, we can make it boil at will.

All practical knowledge of physical nature and all control over it are essentially of the same kind. Scientism proposed that the same kind of knowledge and of control held true for the social world.]