Here is an essay by Dennis Overbye. Key paragraphs:
The knock on science from its cultural and religious critics is that it is arrogant and materialistic. It tells us wondrous things about nature and how to manipulate it, but not what we should do with this knowledge and power. The Big Bang doesn’t tell us how to live, or whether God loves us, or whether there is any God at all. It provides scant counsel on same-sex marriage or eating meat. It is silent on the desirability of mutual assured destruction as a strategy for deterring nuclear war.
Einstein seemed to echo this thought when he said, “I have never obtained any ethical values from my scientific work.” Science teaches facts, not values, the story goes.
Worse, not only does it not provide any values of its own, say its detractors, it also undermines the ones we already have, devaluing anything it can’t measure, reducing sunsets to wavelengths and romance to jiggly hormones. It destroys myths and robs the universe of its magic and mystery.
So the story goes.
But this is balderdash. Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.
That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity—the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill—that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.
Notice the sleight of hand. People who say that science cannot supply values (I am one of them) are not saying that there are no scientific values or virtues. The scientific method puts a premium on such things as honesty and openness. These are qualities that the scientist brings (or is supposed to bring) to his or her craft. This has nothing to do with whether science can discover values in the world or tell us how we should live. What we want from science, and all we should expect from science, is an accurate picture of how things are, for better or for worse. What we do with this knowledge is up to us, as individuals and as citizens. That someone is a scientist, in other words, does not give his or her values any special weight. The same is true of philosophers. I always ask those who think that philosophers have special insight into the good and the right where we got that special insight. Was there a graduate seminar in which students learn these things? If so, I missed it. Philosophers differ as much on evaluative matters as any other group of people, if not more so. The same is true of scientists.
