Week Seven of the Book Challenge

Signing on for the book challenge showed me how much I'd lost the habit of reading for pleasure in the past few years.  On the chair side table for this week:

The Magician's Twin:  C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society  John G. West, Editor
A Study in Scarlet  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

From A Study in Scarlet:

"This fellow may be very clever," I said to myself, "but he is certainly very conceited." ~~Dr. Watson when getting acquainted with Sherlock Holmes.

"But the Solar System!" I protested.  
"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If  we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work." ~~Watson and Holmes on Copernican Theory.

 From The Magician's Twin:

"Lewis took pains to emphasize that he was not 'anti-science'.  But he unequivocally opposed scientism, the wrong-headed belief that modern science supplies the only reliable method of knowledge about the world, and its corollary that scientists have the right to dictate a society's morals, religious beliefs, and even government policies merely because of their scientific expertise." ~~ Page 12

"Scientism was a greater threat in Lewis's view than fascism or communism because it infected representative democracies like Britain no less than totalitarian societies:  'The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man, goes on apace among Communitsts and Democrats no less than among Fascists.' Lewis acknowledged that '[t]he methods may (at first) differ in brutality' between scientism and totalitarianism...." ~~ Page 31

"At the end of The Abolition of Man, Lewis issued a call for a 'regenerate science' that would seek to understand human beings and other living things as they really are, not try to reduce them to automatons." ~~ Page 39