The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers by Curtis White
I was expecting a lot more from this essay praising romantic-era thought. The author begins by criticizing modern atheistic deterministic thought. Science can explain everything. Even human thought and "freewill" are seen as illusions predertmined by chemical activity. The author's response is that this argument is too simplistic and that we need to pay attention to the arts and humanities. There is an emphasis on looking at the romantic era and how science was a subset of the arts.
The arguments came up fairly flat. "Look at the arts! You can't use a computer to identify what is great art!" It feels rather flat. Does science have all the answers? Could the arts be explained by science? How can one really respond to a "know it all" that seems to have all the right answers (even if the right answers change all the time.)
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