This is the finest essay you have penned to date John, but I wondered if it could not just as easily have been titled "The New Scientists"—scientists who have adopted "scientism" as a complete and all-encompassing secular world-view that includes humanism (as traditionally conceived) but is not necessarily restricted to its tenets or activities. In several publications I have noted your important contribution to the building of a scientistic world-view through the primary vehicle of its dissemination—book publishing. Since we live in a free society and a free market, instead of cursing the darkness we scientists should light a candle through books, magazines, radio, television, the Internet, and other forms of communication. My hat's off to you and to the Edge community for the construction of this culture of scientism. We have come a long ways, but it's a long row to hoe.

To that extent I feel your essay is as much prescriptive as it is descriptive. That is, this is definitely the direction our culture is moving but we are not quite there yet. As the publisher of a science magazine (Skeptic) and a contributing editor and monthly columnist for another science magazine (Scientific American), I find myself, like you, prescribing as much as describing this scientistic (third) culture. And if you compare Skeptic to, say, The Humanist magazine, or Free Inquiry magazine (the two main humanist publications in America), there is still a striking difference in content. Where they cover issues like abortion, birth control, overpopulation, third world poverty, civil and human rights around the world, separation of church and state, freedom of speech, etc., we (Skeptic, and even less so Scientific American) rarely deal with these issues, and when we do it is only orthogonally so where they intercept with, say, what science can tell us when "life begins," or what new technologies there are for birth control, why overpopulation is related to education, how poverty can be effected by the adoption of a market economy, why church and state need to be kept separate in order to protect the teaching of the theory of evolution from creationists, etc.

In other words, my "Scientism" and your "Third Culture" are really still mostly science and not so much humanism, because science still has little to say about absolute moral choices. Science may be able to inform our moral choices (e.g., abortion before the 23rd week is not murder because the neural template is not yet complete, thus there can be no consciousness, thought, etc.), but science cannot (or, at least, has yet to date) to provide actual moral decisions somehow apart from the human being making that moral decision in a very personal way. This is a (so far) insoluble problem. The "why" is the easy part—science (more specifically, evolutionary ethics and evolutionary psychology) can explain the origin of morality. The "how" part is a different (and more difficult) story. How we should be moral, science has far less to say. I have yet to determine if this is a permanent limitation of science, or just that no one has solved the problem yet. Until then, I fear that the gap (although closing) between science and humanism may never be completely closed.

MICHAEL SHERMER Publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and author of The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense. [more....]