Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.

Greetings, I'm Andrew McDermott. Today I'm happy to welcome back Michael Ashleman,

professor of Anglophone culture at the University of Italian Switzerland, Lugano, and Professor Emeritus of Education at Boston University.

This is part two of our discussion of Eshleman's book The Restoration of Man, see as Lewis and the continuing case against

Scientificism, published by Discovery Institute Press.

It's a newly revised and updated edition of Ashleman's celebrated study of Lewis and Scientific originally published in 1983.

Discovery Institute co-founder and senior fellow George Gilder wrote a forward to the 1998

edition of the book. As the digital age arrived, he cautioned against the perils of

scientism. With the hierarchies of mind and matter upended, right reason gives way to inductive fact-mongering on the moral flatlands of the

World Wide Web.

Giving up on mere common sense, Homo sapiens readily defers to the higher authority of homoscience,

only to degenerate almost immediately to homosentians,

summoned up less by what he thinks than by what he feels.

Michael, welcome back to the show.

Thank you very much, Andrew.

In the first part of our conversation,

you helped us understand why CS Lewis tackled

scientism in his books and why he remains

enduringly popular still today. Can you mention a few things about that and

you might remind listeners what scientific is defined as? Yes sure, happily. what's their application to phenomena over which they have no validity or no valid insight.

So it's a form of reductionism, reducing things to their only or merely physical components, matter space, time, mass, or even energy.

Scientific materialism would be another way of putting it's often called physicalism or even epip phenomenalism and my book

...