Well Dawkins may be one such scientist. The "new atheists" (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens) are basically staunch materialists: they think that the only thing that exists is matter.
What that means is that personal conscious experience is nothing but matter. That means all morality, all beauty, love, everything is just matter... and just a matter of science.
Aha, the "
Four Horsemen." They should get a registered trademark on that term, though it's only three now.
The problem is that these people are not random. They are very influential, and they shape the worldview for a lot of highly educated people who think it's axiomatic that the mind is nothing but a machine evolution put together. It's becoming increasingly unfashionable and derided to have any other view. That's what's dangerous: that people think any other view is supernatural, irrational, etc.
While people like Dennett are at the extremely outspoken ends, the trickle-down versions of their philosophy are watering the trough for everyone else, including most scientists.
Er ... but he's a science fanboy, isn't he? Not an actual scientist.
According to Wikipedia, Dennett is a cognitive scientist. The book he-co-edited with Hofstdater, "The Mind's I," is fascinating in several ways, and I recommend it to anyone reading this thread. Much of it is about ideas that manipulate emotions - the "robot" stories in the book are especially good at this. But it's also about the philosophy of science and what the mind is.
Another interesting book s Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind," a critique of "hard" artificial intelligence that also includes an informal course in quantum mechanics (as I recall, that's a large part of the book). His argument is that the firings of neurons in the brain are influenced by quantum-level fluctuations, and so have a random component that cannot be reproduced by a deterministic machine (computer). It was a popular and important book, but many have dismissed the claim for many reasons, one being that the energies in a neuron are many orders of magnitude above any possible quantum influence, and so cannot have any significant influence. "Strong AI" has yet to be shown true or false, but despite the author's attempt, this book doesn't appear to offer strong evidence either way.
I think we may be arguing past each other.
I completely agree with you that science nowadays generates a lot from the manipulation of its theoretical and mathematical machinery.
I've read that as an argument against String/Superstring/M (whatever these things are called) Theory, that most if not all of the conclusions and claims are untestable. While this is an important area of modern theoretical physics, it doesn't appear to have any bearing on the recent posts in this thread.
And it's not really science per se that I have a problem with. It's about how science is regarded by many as the only method of finding truth that is the problem. That philosophy is what I call materialism.
Okay, that's different definition than I envisioned. Maybe we could call the people who believe that "strong materialists."
Your use of the word "truth" bothers me a bit, because it has some connotations that aren't covered by science.
But science is abundantly successful in finding facts, and many of them very useful facts at that. It's hard to think what idea or activity or whatever would be in second place as far as finding facts - regardless, if measured by the number of facts, or just number of USEFUL facts, it would be a far distant second place from science.
Philosophy and/or logic might be in second place, though the facts generated might be more in dispute. Logic is actually a subset of mathematics, which is in its own world, but which is widely applicable to practical situations and scientific investigations.
So going just by past achievements, it's reasonable to see why someone would think science could answer all questions.
On the other hand, just because it's so succesful, it doesn't logically follow that it will continue to be so successful, so (as I see it) one cannot logically conclude that science will or can answer all questions.
I read your blogpost about the perception of colors, and yes it's interesting, and an argument I've heard before (though I don't recall where). I'm not sure that it's a successful argument, however.