If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?
Thus wrote Carl Sagan, in the first chapter of The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark (Random House, 1996), one of his more popular books which sets out to "explain the scientific method to laymen, and to encourage people to learn critical or skeptical thinking." It is ironic, therefore, to find him here thrusting science into areas unrelated to it and making a fine display of very poor reasoning. Sagan, although he loved science, was certainly not a philosopher, yet both skepticism and critical thinking are philosophical subjects, not scientific ones. As much as I loved Sagan, he really ought to have avoided the folly Dawkins persists in, by keeping aware of his limitations: stick to what he knows, and avoid speaking on things which he clearly was not adequately versed.
It is categorically impossible for science to deflate our conceits (as he put it) when it comes to the issue of whether or not we are the reason there is a Universe. The scientific method empowers us to discover the structure and evolution of the Universe, on the whole as well as its parts, but it has nothing to say about teleology or the reason why the Universe exists. Science simply has nothing to say about the purpose or meaning of any thing; such comes from a different discipline: philosophy, that discipline which is the very foundation upon which science itself is based and from which it is enabled to operate in the first place. Affirming science consistently as the ultimate paradigm of rationality leads inexorably to rank self-stultification whose end is nihilism and the abdication of knowledge and reason altogether.
Science cannot "do us a disservice in deflating our conceits," sir, when it comes to the purpose of the Universe's existence, because science does not do business with purpose or meaning; it can examine certain properties of the Universe but it cannot tell you why the Universe exists, much less rule mankind out as the reason. One can discuss the purpose or meaning of the Universe but to do so is to engage metaphysics, not science.
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