The Myth of Progress and Knowledge
Knowledge
In the forward of the paperback edition of Straw Dogs, before we even reach page one of the actual text, Gray states that “outside of science, progress is simply a myth.” He goes on to say that religious believers today have been “driven to the margins of a culture in which science claims authority over all of human knowledge”[1] John Gray. Straw Dogs. 1st ed. N.p.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Print. (xi).. This is just the beginning of a book-long attack against the existence of progress and knowledge anywhere outside of science itself.
Of these two attacks, the attack against knowledge is the least prevalent. Perhaps this is so because it is also the easiest to refute. One can simply point to the scientific method and ask whether or not we have knowledge of it. If we do, then the idea of all knowledge somehow being under the authority of science alone is absurd. If we know anything to be true as a result of science, and/or the scientific method, we must, then, by necessity know that science itself is a valid method for obtaining said truths. If we don’t know science to be a valid method then the results of applying it certainly do not constitute knowledge in any sense of the word.
In short, this is scientism and it is itself a proposition of philosophy and not science. It also happens to be, according to Moreland and Craig in Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, widely accepted as a self-refuting proposition which, besides meaning that it can never be true, also means that “no amount of scientific progress in the future will have the slightest effect on making (it) more acceptable”[2] Ibid. (348).. What this means in its simplest form is that scientism is a philosophical claim that refutes the validity of all philosophical claims. It does this by trying to elevate science above the presuppositions by which it hangs and in doing so the entire claim falls apart and thus it becomes an impossibility for science to ever put the pieces back together.