Losing Control of an Extended Analogy: Lessl's Analysis of Gnostic Scientism

Thomas Lessl has written several articles that compare science to religion. ¹ This is an intriguing analogy because it brings together two realms of human activity that are commonly thought to be at odds. Through this extended analogy, Lessl has offered a way of thinking about science that is valuable because it deflates some of the more bloated claims of that enterprise while building a better understanding of why the public communication of scientists is designed in the way it is. For example, in one article, Lessl describes the way the Roman Catholic Church's Latin mass separated and elevated the priestly code from profane language, and he productively compares it to the way much popular science communication uses "a certain amount of often loosely employed technical language" that does little to educate the reader. ² Likewise, the excitement of some popular science is well explained by Lessl in an article that points out a scientific rhetor's use of mythic qualities that serve "the same needs that religious discourse has traditionally satisfied for churchgoers." ³

Unfortunately, there is also a significant drawback to spending long hours scrutinizing an object through the lens of an extended analogy. Convinced that the analogy holds (since it has been so useful in the past), a critic makes arguments that support the analogy, even when the object being examined is being distorted by that lens. We think this is the case with Lessl's most recent extension of the "science is religion" analogy.

In "Gnostic Scientism and the Prohibition of Questions," Lessl examines works by five thinkers: E. O. Wilson, Carl Sagan, Stephen Pinker, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Lewontin. Although these writers do not consciously realize it, Lessl holds, each has gone well beyond scientism, the belief in science as the best method of inquiry, to embrace a form of spiritual belief. Lessl calls this belief "scientistic gnosticism." The belief is dangerous, Lessl argues: it pretends to be scientific when it is actually being spiritual, and therefore it misleads both the reading public and students who are taught science in public schools; its practitioners are elitists who claim to possess exclusive and absolute knowledge that is denied to run-of-the-mill people; and contradictions within the belief system lead its practitioners to shut off the valuable challenging of scientific precepts, specifically the questioning of evolution as a base theory for science. ⁴

Lessl's argument can be productively queried at a number of places. Are Wilson, Sagan, Pinker, Dennett, and Lewontin opinion leaders in the scientific community as Lessl suggests, or does their ethos suffer from the controversy of their beliefs and their status as popularizers? Do these writers form enough of a critical mass to comprise a movement within science, a wave so widespread that its influences are felt from the living room to the classroom? And does this movement actually succeed in encouraging scientists to consider themselves an elite priesthood and to severely curtail necessary and useful discussion (results Lessl says are logically and inevitably the results of the gnostic belief structure)? ⁵

To get this far, however, one must have already accepted that these scientists have gnostic tendencies that are discernible in their written texts. According to Lessl, there are two relevant features of the gnostic impulse: "The first of these is its radically dualistic view of the world, which provokes the alienation that characterizes the gnostic experience of the world. The second feature is the saving knowledge (gnosis) to which the gnostic believer appeals in an effort to justify science's freedom from the determinism and alienation that arise from a materialist ontology." ⁶ In this critique of Lessl's essay, we will examine the evidence he uses to support his claim that Wilson and Sagan exhibit these two characteristics of gnostic spirituality. ⁷ It is our contention...