History of science can be written as the story of expanding scientism. Richard Gregory, the editor of Nature in the 1930s, said, ‘My grandfather preached the gospel of Christ, my father preached the gospel of socialism, I preach the gospel of science'. Such a belief in science is not without reason. Science proved to be the most successful pursuit of knowledge. The spectacular civilisation today is the product of modern science which was so successful. Scientism grew out of the development of science.
Scientism launched with the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. As a result science rose as the centre of European civilisation replacing the Christian Church. The establishment of Newtonian physics was the peak of the Scientific Revolution. It was a formidable victory. Newton was never challenged for more than a century in the fields where he excelled. In the Age of Reason Newton was the hero of philosophes in France. They admired science, believed progress and rejected religion. It led to the attempts to explain all the social phenomena with science. They believed that mankind marched towards better stage as science developed. The simple equation that science equals progress was universally accepted. Abstract reason, mathematisation, mechanical view of nature, anti-teleology were the characteristics of the Scientific Revolution. As science emphasised the independence of objective reality, the subjectivity of man became downgraded. Man was no longer the subject with purpose, emotion and value, but the object which was observed, measured and manipulated.
The Industrial Revolution of the 18 th and 19 th century was another turning point. In the beginning the alliance between science and technology was uneven and insufficient. But the close cooperation of science and technology in the later period resulted the explosive development of industry. The shift from scientia contemplativa to scientia activa et operativa was finally realised. The Baconian dream for industrial civilisation was in full bloom. At the time of the Scientific Revolution, the influence of science was confined to intellectual circle. Now science could exert impact to the general public and change the structure of society through technology. The splendid achievement of science and technology during the Industrial Revolution encouraged scientism to the great extent. There was wide spread conviction that science would lead history to the direction of enhancing freedom for everybody. Such tendency was strengthened continuously till the 20 th century.
In philosophy positivism emerged as a repulsion to the extreme speculative philosophy of 19 th century Germany. There is no doubt that it also fostered scientism. The analytic style of 20th century philosophy of science was the outcome of the age when the belief in science reached its climax. The only mode of knowledge recognised in the logical positivism of the 1930s was the scientific and its extension. The classic problems of epistemology gave its seat to observation and metaphysics was eliminated for its unverifiability. History and ethics disappeared and we had to wait for another generation to see them reinstated.
There certainly were some resistances against scientism. In the early 17th century John Donne, a metaphysical poet wrote: “‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.” It was the resentment about the disturbances brought by new science. As time went on humanists denounced the science devoid of humanistic elements in higher tone. It was the Romantic Revolt to cold Mechanical Philosophy. However, they were minorities and their voices were too weak to curb the tyranny of scientism.
The first half of the 20th century witnessed several serious abuses of science. Eugenics, despite of its good meaning (good in birth), turned out to be a dirty word. National Origins Quota Law of the United States was obvious discrimination against non-Anglo-Saxons. Sterilisation laws were passed in the United States and Europe in the 1930s. It was terrible infringement of human rights. Especially in Nazi Germany 400,000 socially unsuitable and intellectually handicapped people were forcedly sterilised between 1934-1939. The most horrible abuse of science was the human experimentations by Nazi and Japanese army during World War II. Ruthless human experimentations were carried out in Auschwitz and in the ‘Factory of Death', Pingfang, China in the name of science. In the Unit 731, Japanese doctors experimented, tortured and killed more than 3,000 Chinese, Russians, Mongols, Manchus, Koreans and Americans for the systematic studies on bacteriological warfare.
At the Nuremberg Military Tribunal 23 German physicians were prosecuted for their involvement in the Nazi human experimentations. In the case of the Unit 731, however, nobody was punished. The United States pardoned them in return to the valuable informations it got from them. No explanation has been given as to why the United States treated the Japanese and German criminals in different ways. The U.S. government has the burden to give an answer. For the crimes of Japanese doctors, there were no counterparts of the Nuremberg Trial and the Nuremberg Code. Due to Japanese denials, the relative silence of Chinese and Taiwanese governments and the American cover-up, Japanese doctors' atrocities have been much less known and explored. The governments of both Koreas have never raised the issue.
Jacob Bronowski begins his book Science and Human Values with his vivid feeling when he stood on the ruins of Nagasaki not long after the explosion of atomic bomb. 40,000 were killed by a flash which lasted for seconds. Ironically the bomb exploded over the main Christian community in Japan. There have been controversies on the inevitability of dropping the bomb twice. Any arguments for it can hardly been defended. The heyday of pure science which J. R. Ravetz calls ‘academic science' ended with atomic bomb. It shattered the naive view of science. Scientists began to think about such words as conscience, responsibility and ethics sincerely. Many prominent scientists joined the anti-nuclear movement after the war.
Still science seemed to be a guarantee for progress in spite of the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, the image of science became aggravated suddenly in the 1960s due to the environmental deterioration such as Minamata disease and Torey Canyon . Science was the target of the counter-culture movement which swept over industrialised countries. The attack on science came from within as well as from outside the scientific community. The criticism of science was not confined to intellectuals, but pervaded widely among the general public. Anti-science movement aimed at not only high technology, but also science itself. The challenge to the goal and result of science policy came to doubting the inherent norm of science and its epistemological status.
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