Ah, the good old Enlightenment. The one that displaced the Christian religion with the cult of "reason" and put religious life behind closed doors. It was the beginning of the break with the Christian legacy of the West; and look how well that has worked out with deism - self worship - philosophy and (anti) social sciences. Second Dark Ages here we come!

Social science, an Oxymoron.

ttbn & Hasbeen,

Spot-on !

The academic-backed social "experts" of no life experience who spruik their ignorance of anything sensible !

The writer in my opinion, brings a subjective view to the topics discussed. That being so, demeans the scientific view over so called morality. Which would seem to need spirituality to make said morality function.

In other words, needs be, based on some religious practise? Ignores the fact that religious practise comes with centuries of rape, murder and paedophilia. And blood-soaked sword wielding Bishops of the head of mass murdering armies.

Moral philosophy is purely personal and only requires we follow the example of the master not those who followed and self-appoint to speak for him.

If we look at creation and the big bang theory, we see that from nothing comes lots of nothing.

That in nature there are immutable laws that must be followed by science if they are to understand anything. And means for me there needed to be a foundational intelligence in the design of the universe, all life forms and inanimate matter.
Alan B.

Three references and associated websites which provide an Illuminated Understanding of the (seeming) never-ending conflict between old-style creator-God religiosity, and modern secular rationalism. And why old-style classical "education" is totally inadequate to deal with living in the quantum-world of the "21st century" in which everyone is now instantaneously inter-connected

http://www.beezone.com/beezones-main-stack/chap_1_the_new_reformation.html

http://www.dabase.org/up-1-2.htm

http://www.aboutadidam.org/readings/parental_deity/index.html

And an essay which links/compares the statement Christ Is Risen to the Quantum Understanding signaled by the famous equation E=MC2

http://www.beezone.com/beezones-main-stack/christ_equals_emsquared.html

It is also interesting to note that the author of this essay claims that the kind of classical "education" that she promotes has been in existence for 2000 years.
Not so.
Modern "education" consists primarily of left-brained spirit-killing book learning. Never mind that up until the time of the invention of Gutenberg's movable type an thus the widespread availability of books (especially the Bible) only a teensy weensy minuscule fraction of human beings had any kind of such book-based "education". And even then wide-scale mass-"education" only came into existence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Speaking of the intrinsic limits of left-brained learning Iain McGilchrist addresses this topic in his book The Master & His Emissary - The Left Brain and the Making of the Western World

Hmm

I think I agree with the author to a point. Empirical and scientific methods are never going to describe the full range of human values and experiences. But it varies a lot depending on which social science you are discussing. Empiricism has less of a role in politics than economics, for example.

The author asks, “Imagine an economic system that was forced to account for transcendentals such as purpose, goodness, truth and beauty in addition to material product”. In one sense, economics already does this, albeit from a narrow perspective of human subjectivity. The subjective theory of value says that a thing is worth what a person thinks it is worth – a Rembrandt painting is worth more than my mother’s water-coloured landscapes because someone (actually a lot of people), value it more highly.

But in another sense, I think she is making a category error. Economics doesn’t account for beauty for the same reason that criminology and demography don’t. They are distinct disciplines with their own purposes and processes, and contribute to the sum of human knowledge and wellbeing in different ways.

Where I think I would agree with the author is that some social scientists downplay or refuse to acknowledge the subjective values and implicit priorities that guide their work. Jim Chalmers’ recent controversial speech on “values capitalism” was an attempt to grapple with that question (whether successful or not is another matter).

But it can also be true that criticism of empiricism and scientific approaches to social questions comes from people who don’t like the what the evidence shows. I well remember a lecturer who was convinced that poverty in the developing world was rising as a result of globalisation and free trade. When I pointed out that the overwhelming body of evidence pointed to the exact opposite – from the World Bank, United Nations, and pretty much every development economist on the planet - she told me to go away and find a source that agreed with her. There are no credible ones.