Science Under Siege Contesting The Secular Religion of Scientism 1St Edition Dick Houtman Editor All Chapter

Science under Siege: Contesting the
Secular Religion of Scientism 1st

Edition Dick Houtman (Editor)
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/science-under-siege-contesting-the-secular-religion-o
f-scientism-1st-edition-dick-houtman-editor/
CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY
Science under Siege

Contesting the Secular Religion
of Scientism
Edited by
Dick Houtman
Stef Aupers
Rudi Laermans
Cultural Sociology
Series Editors
Jeffrey C. Alexander, Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale
University, New Haven, CT, USA
Ron Eyerman, Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale
University, New Haven, CT, USA
David Inglis, Department of Sociology, University of
Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Philip Smith, Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University,
New Haven, CT, USA
Cultural sociology is widely acknowledged as one of the most vibrant
areas of inquiry in the social sciences across the world today. The Palgrave
Macmillan Series in Cultural Sociology is dedicated to the proposition
that deep meanings make a profound difference in social life. Culture is
not simply the glue that holds society together, a crutch for the weak, or
a mystifying ideology that conceals power. Nor is it just practical knowl-
edge, dry schemas, or know how. The series demonstrates how shared
and circulating patterns of meaning actively and inescapably penetrate
the social. Through codes and myths, narratives and icons, rituals and
representations, these culture structures drive human action, inspire social
movements, direct and build institutions, and so come to shape history.
The series takes its lead from the cultural turn in the humanities, but
insists on rigorous social science methods and aims at empirical expla-
nations. Contributions engage in thick interpretations but also account
for behavioral outcomes. They develop cultural theory but also deploy
middle-range tools to challenge reductionist understandings of how the
world actually works. In so doing, the books in this series embody the
spirit of cultural sociology as an intellectual enterprise.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14945
Dick Houtman · Stef Aupers · Rudi Laermans
Editors
Science under Siege

Contesting the Secular Religion of Scientism
Editors
Dick Houtman Stef Aupers
Center for Sociological Research Institute for Media Studies
University of Leuven University of Leuven
Leuven, Belgium Leuven, Belgium
Rudi Laermans
Center for Sociological Research
University of Leuven
Leuven, Belgium
Cultural Sociology
ISBN 978-3-030-69648-1 ISBN 978-3-030-69649-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69649-8
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Baac3nes, Getty Images
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface
This book has its origins in two research groups, one at Erasmus Univer-
sity Rotterdam, The Netherlands, the other at KU Leuven, Belgium.
Until they left for Leuven in 2013 and 2014, respectively, the book’s first
two editors (Dick Houtman and Stef Aupers) were based in Rotterdam,
where they collaborated with Peter Achterberg, Willem de Koster, and
Jeroen van der Waal. In 2014 Peter also left Rotterdam, in his case for
Tilburg University, the Netherlands, which left only Willem and Jeroen in
Rotterdam, where they have been based until the present day. Upon their
arrival in Leuven Dick and Stef started collaborating with Rudi Laermans,
this book’s third editor. All contributors other than Peter, Willem and
Jeroen are (or were until recently) either Ph.D. students or Postdocs at
KU Leuven.
All of us share interest and expertise in cultural sociology, with substan-
tive research interests ranging from politics to art and from media to
religion. With the exception of Massimiliano Simons, who is as much a
philosopher of science as a cultural sociologist, none of us boasts a special-
ized research interest in science. Yet, our variegated cultural-sociological
research interests confronted all of us with issues pertaining to the
authority of science, which sparked the initiative for this joint book. Two
previously published articles in Public Understanding of Science provided
its starting point, one by Jaron Harambam and Stef Aupers and the other
by Peter Achterberg, Willem de Koster, and Jeroen van der Waal. The
Leuven group then embarked on an extensive series of discussions about
v
vi PREFACE
the authority of science, more specifically about seven additional chapters

in progress.
Chapters 8 and 9 of this book are as such based on the two abovemen-
tioned previously published articles that have both been adapted to better
fit the logic and argument of the book:
• Harambam, Jaron, and Stef Aupers. 2015. “Contesting Epistemic

Authority: Conspiracy Theories on the Boundaries of Science.”
Public Understanding of Science 24 (4): 466–80.
• Achterberg, Peter, Willem de Koster, and Jeroen van der Waal. 2017.
“A Science Confidence Gap: Education, Trust in Scientific Methods,
and Trust in Scientific Institutions in the United States, 2014.”
Public Understanding of Science 26 (6): 704–20.
We gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint revised versions of

these articles. We also want to thank Palgrave Macmillan’s Mary al-
Sayed, Madison Allums, Elizabeth Graber, Liam McLean, Dilli Babu
Perumal, and Sham Anand for their helpfulness and kind cooperation at
various stages of the process, and we gratefully acknowledge the valu-
able comments and suggestions by two anonymous reviewers. We are
convinced that the latter have added much to the quality of the final
manuscript. Finally, we thank Jeff Alexander and Phil Smith for their
support, encouragement, and interest in the project.
Leuven, Belgium Dick Houtman

December 2020 Stef Aupers
Rudi Laermans
Contents
1 Introduction: A Cultural Sociology of the Authority

of Science 1
Dick Houtman, Stef Aupers, and Rudi Laermans
Part I Scientific Authority in the Face of Pluralism

2 The Disenchantment of the World and the Authority
of Sociology: How the Queen of the Sciences Lost Her
Throne 37
Dick Houtman
3 Down the Rabbit Hole: Heterodox Science
on the Internet 65
Stef Aupers and Lars de Wildt
4 The Pluralization of Academia: Disentangling Artistic
Research 89
Rudi Laermans
Part II Cultural Worldviews and the Authority of

Scientific Truth Claims
5 Elective Affinities Between Religion and Neuroscience:
The Cases of Conservative Protestantism
and Mindfulness Spirituality 115
Liza Cortois and Anneke Pons-de Wit
vii
viii CONTENTS
6 Cultural Worldviews and Lay Interpretations

of Research Findings: The Role of the Scientific
Consensus 133
Paul Tromp and Peter Achterberg
Part III Contesting the Authority of Scientific

Institutions
7 ‘Science Without Scientists’: DIY Biology
and the Renegotiation of the Life Sciences 155
Massimiliano Simons
8 Contesting Epistemic Authority: Conspiracy Theories
on the Boundaries of Science 179
Jaron Harambam and Stef Aupers
9 A Science Confidence Gap: Education, Trust
in Scientific Methods, and Trust in Scientific
Institutions in the United States, 2014 203
Peter Achterberg, Willem de Koster,
and Jeroen van der Waal
Index 231
Notes on Contributors
Peter Achterberg is Professor of Sociology at Tilburg University, The

Netherlands. His research focuses on cultural, religious, and political
change in the West. More information about Peter can be obtained
through his personal website www.peterachterberg.nl.
Stef Aupers is Professor of Media Culture at the Institute for Media
Studies, University of Leuven, Belgium. As a cultural sociologist, he
studies the mediatization of social life and contemporary culture. Stef has
published widely in international peer-reviewed journals on game culture,
digital religion, and conspiracy theories on the Internet.
Liza Cortois is a postdoctoral researcher at Hasselt University, Belgium.
She obtained her PhD at the University of Leuven, Belgium, in 2019 with
a dissertation titled Becoming an Individual: A Cultural-Sociological Study
of Socialization in Individualistic Scripts, funded by Research Founda-
tion—Flanders (FWO). She is interested in socialization processes in indi-
vidualist cultures and published previously in the Journal of Contemporary
Religion (2018) about mindfulness spirituality.
Jaron Harambam is an interdisciplinary sociologist working on
conspiracy theories, (social) media, and AI (content moderation,
search/recommender systems). He holds a Marie Sklodowska-Curie
Individual Fellowship at Leuven University’s Institute for Media Studies
in Belgium, is editor-in-chief of the Dutch-Flemish peer-reviewed journal
Tijdschrift Sociologie, and his monograph Contemporary Conspiracy
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Culture: Truth and Knowledge in an Era of Epistemic Instability is out

with Routledge.
Dick Houtman is Professor of Sociology of Culture and Religion at the
University of Leuven, Belgium. He studies cultural conflict and cultural
change in the West since the 1960s. Most of his publications address
either the spiritual turn in religion or the rise of a political culture that
foregrounds cultural issues and identity. His next book is provisionally
titled The Hunt for Real Reality: The West on the Wings of Imagination
(personal website: www.dickhoutman.nl).
Willem de Koster is Professor of General Sociology at Erasmus
University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He studies how social
groups give meaning to social issues, how this informs their
actions, and how it shapes their responses to new information and
the (urban) environment they live in. For more information, see
www.willemdekoster.nl.
Rudi Laermans is Professor of Sociological Theory at the Faculty of
Social Sciences of the University of Leuven, Belgium. His research and
publications are situated within the realms of social theory and the soci-
ology of the arts. Recent book publications: Moving Together: Theorizing
and Making Contemporary Dance (2015) and, in Dutch, Weber (2017;
together with Dick Houtman).
Anneke Pons-de Wit is a PhD student in cultural sociology at the
University of Leuven, Belgium. Her PhD project addresses whether and
how religious pluralism changes the identities of atheists, conservative
Christians, and those identifying as spiritual. She also participated in
research projects about social media, popular religious music cultures,
and material culture in the Protestant Dutch Bible Belt, about which she
published in journals like Social Compass and Material Religion.
Massimiliano Simons is a philosopher focusing on recent shifts within
contemporary life sciences such as these toward metagenomics and
synthetic biology. In 2019 he defended his PhD in philosophy on
synthetic biology at the University of Leuven, Belgium, and he is now
a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, Belgium, working on the
concept of techno-science.
Paul Tromp is a PhD candidate at the Center for Sociological Research,
University of Leuven, Belgium. His PhD project addresses religious
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
decline and religious change in Western Europe (1981–2008). He grad-

uated from the Research Master in Social and Behavioral Sciences at
Tilburg University, The Netherlands, and his chapter in this volume
results from his Master’s thesis.
Jeroen van der Waal is Professor of Sociology of Stratification in the
Department of Public Administration and Sociology at Erasmus Univer-
sity Rotterdam, The Netherlands. His research aims to explain why social
stratification is linked to health outcomes and political attitudes and
behaviors in Western countries. For more information, see his personal
website www.jeroenvanderwaal.com.
Lars de Wildt is a postdoctoral researcher in Media Studies at the
University of Leuven, Belgium. He studies how technologies change the
way people produce and consume culture, including how online platforms
have changed conspiracy theory in a post-truth age, and how videogames
have changed religion in a post-secular age. For more, see www.larsdewil
dt.eu.
List of Figures
Chapter 6
Fig. 1 Interaction effect between reconciliation and hierarchical
individualism—egalitarian communitarianism 145
Fig. 2 Interaction effect between controversy and hierarchical
individualism—egalitarian communitarianism 146
Chapter 9
Fig. 1 Hypothesized relationships (gray arrows depict
the reflexive-modernization explanation, black arrows depict
the anomie explanation) 211
xiii
List of Tables
Chapter 6
Table 1 Experimental design with three treatment conditions 139
Table 2 Factor loadings of twelve items measuring hierarchical
individualism versus egalitarian communitarianism (N =
216; principal axis factoring without rotation) 142
Table 3 Descriptive statistics for the variables in the analysis 143
Table 4 Multiple linear regression with scientific certainty
as dependent variable (N = 216) 144
Chapter 9
Table 1 Factor analysis on items measuring trust in scientific
institutions and trust in scientific methods
(principal-component factors, varimax rotation
with normalization, pattern matrix, N = 1921) 216
Table 2 Zero-order correlations between level of education
and mediating and dependent variables 217
Table 3 Explaining the relationship between education and trust
in scientific methods, trust in scientific institutions,
and a science confidence gap (OLS regression analyses,
unstandardized coefficients shown, robust standard errors
in parentheses) 218
xv
xvi LIST OF TABLES
Table 4 Decomposition of the initial effect of education into direct

effect and indirect effects via institutional knowledge,
reflexive-modern values, and anomie (KHB-method;
unstandardized coefficients shown; robust standard errors
in parentheses) 220
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: A Cultural Sociology

of the Authority of Science
Dick Houtman, Stef Aupers, and Rudi Laermans
An institution under attack must reexamine its foundations, restate its

objectives, seek out its rationale (Merton 1973 [1942], 267)
1 Marching for Science

On April 22, 2017, tens of thousands of people, scientists and concerned
citizens alike, marched for science in Washington, DC. In the pouring
rain, media personality and science popularizer Bill Nye (‘the Science
Guy’) addressed the crowd: ‘We are marching today to remind people
D. Houtman (B)
Center for Sociological Research, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
e-mail: dick.houtman@kuleuven.be
S. Aupers
Institute for Media Studies, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
e-mail: stef.aupers@kuleuven.be
R. Laermans
Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
e-mail: rudi.laermans@kuleuven.be
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
D. Houtman et al. (eds.), Science under Siege, Cultural Sociology,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69649-8_1
2 D. HOUTMAN ET AL.
everywhere, our lawmakers especially, of the significance of science for

our health and prosperity.’ In the shadow of the National Monument,
close to the White House, he warned against political elites ‘deliberately
ignoring and actively suppressing science.’ A participant interviewed by
CNN pointed out the sea change in just half a century: ‘John F. Kennedy
promised this nation that by the end of the sixties we’d land on the moon.
Now, almost fifty years later, we have an American president disparaging
the facts, denigrating science. And we are here to tell him that science
matters.’
Washington’s March for Science coincided with more than 600 satel-
lite marches in a wide range of American and Canadian cities, but also in
Australia (e.g., Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney) and all over Europe (e.g.,
Berlin, Stockholm, London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Budapest, Warsaw,
Belgrade, Bucharest). The protests did not remain confined to the West
either, as testified by marches in Asia (e.g., Ho Chi Minh City, Taipei,
Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Dhaka, Seoul, Quezon), Africa (e.g., Accra,
Abuja, Kampala), South America (e.g., Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá, Santiago,
Buenos Aires), and even Antarctica. Pointing out the promise of science
in overcoming many of the problems that plague humanity, banners and
placards called upon politicians to take science more seriously: ‘Got polio?
Me neither. Thanks, science!’; ‘Science saves lives’; ‘Science is magic that
works’; ‘Science: It works, bitches’; ‘Society should worry when geeks
have to demonstrate’; ‘Physics makes the world go round.’ Even granting
the occasional placard voicing support for the humanities (‘Humanities:
Enlightening the world since the 4th century’), one cannot help but
being struck by the preoccupation with natural science, its technological
accomplishments, and its further promises.
Participants not only marched for science, though. They also did so
against president Donald Trump, who no longer prioritized funds for
scientific research (‘Make America smart again’; ‘Trust scientific facts, not
alternative facts’; ‘You can’t grab science by the pussy!’; ‘Next NASA
mission: launch Trump to Uranus’); who relied on weird notions like
‘alternative facts’; and who considered climate change a hoax by the
Chinese government (‘Mother nature trumps alternative facts’; ‘Ice has
no agenda, it just melts’; ‘We’ve lost our patience: the oceans are rising
and so are we’; ‘Climate change is real’; ‘There is no planet B’). Indeed,
the profiles of the participants in the March for Science resembled those
of the Women’s March and the People’s Climate March, two earlier anti-
Trump protests in Washington, DC. The March for Science did not
1 INTRODUCTION: A CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY … 3
even mobilize any more scientists than either of these, indicating that
it indeed entailed anti-Trump protest as much as pro-science advocacy
(Fisher 2018).
Yet, the event took place against the backdrop of increased conserva-
tive contestations of the authority of science across the period 1974–2014
(Gauchat 2012). The resulting anti-science climate entails a major source
of concern and disagreement in academia. Some academics dismiss the
politicization of science as producing a ‘never-ending pseudo-scientific
debate’ (Brulle 2018, 256) or ‘nonsense debate’ (idem, 257), pointing
out how ‘politically naïve’ (idem, 257) it is to believe that protests like
the March for Science can actually improve the situation. Others oppose
those who ‘naïvely advocate value-free science’ (Kinchy 2020, 78) and do
instead call upon their colleagues in Science and Technology Studies to do
‘engaged STS scholarship,’ emphasizing how important it is that ‘as STS
scholars […] we not just observe these changes, but also oppose them,
in our words and actions’ (idem, 76). Yet, data collected briefly before
and briefly after the March for Science suggest that the event has not
been able to counter the anti-science climate in conservative circles, but
has only increased liberal-conservative polarization about the authority of
science (Motta 2018).
The polarization has not declined since then either, as became partic-
ularly clear when the United States was hit hard by the COVID-19
pandemic in 2020. Dr. Anthony Fauci, prominent member of the White
House Coronavirus Task Force, director of the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and world-leading expert in
infectious disease, felt forced to disagree with the American president
during White House press briefings about the unfolding crisis. By then
Fauci had already advised five consecutive presidents before Trump,
starting with Ronald Reagan during the AIDS epidemic, and boasted
an immaculate reputation as a publicly trusted medical figure. Yet, all
this could not prevent that his disagreement with the president triggered
massive protests from politically rightist groups, even amounting to death
threats and harassment of himself and his family. Startled Democrats felt
forced to rally to Fauci’s defense, exemplifying once again how politically
contested the authority of science has meanwhile become.
Many academics frame conflicts about the authority of science in the
moral terms of good and evil, construing trust in science as good and
condemning its counterpart as morally wrong and socially detrimental.
This moralizing tendency typically coincides with forcing the matter into
4 D. HOUTMAN ET AL.
the political binaries of ‘right’ versus ‘left,’ ‘conservative’ versus ‘liberal,’

or ‘authoritarian’ versus ‘democratic.’ In this book, we seek to neither
condemn nor praise the headwind faced by contemporary science. We
rather approach the issue from a sober cultural-sociological perspective
to dig into the cultural mechanisms that account for the acceptance
or denial of the authority of science. We do so not only because self-
justifying political responses do so easily backfire, but even more so
because construals of contestations of the authority of science as ‘morally
reprehensible,’ ‘rightist,’ or ‘authoritarian’ conceal many an inconve-
nient fact. For cultural and intellectual history provide abundant evidence
that such contestations are not at all necessarily authoritarian and polit-
ically rightist. Not only are they deeply embedded in the philosophy of
science, but left-libertarian critics have massively contested the authority
of science, too, arguing that its mindless acceptance poses a threat to
liberty and democracy.
In this introductory chapter we trace these arguments in intellec-
tual discourse and cultural history to argue that contestations of the
authority of science entail rejections of science as a sort of secular reli-
gion. This notion of science as religion—scientism—is fully consistent
with Durkheim’s classical sociology of religion (Durkheim 1995 [1912]).
For the latter does not define religion conventionally in terms of a nexus
between human beings and the supernatural that defines a path to salva-
tion from suffering, but rather as a cultural distinction between what is
sacred and what is profane, a distinction that may or may not involve
supernatural beings. In Durkheim’s hands the sacred is thus that which
is extraordinary in the sense that it is set apart as deserving special
respect and veneration, and that is as such surrounded by taboos aimed
at protecting it from pollution by the ordinary and the mundane—
the profane, i.e., that which does not deserve any special veneration
or authority. Indeed, one of the cultural mainstays of modernity is the
endowment of science with a sacred status, which degrades religion as
conventionally understood to a profane source of pollution against which
it needs to be protected (Bloor 1976, 46–54). The competing claims
to sacredness resulting from this give rise to the quintessential modern
cultural conflict, i.e., the ‘religion/science conflict’ (Sappington 1991),
or even ‘warfare of science with theology’ (White 1960).
The modern sacralization of science implies that contestations of its
authority entail processes of profanation that dismiss its threefold claim
to authority, i.e., that (1) it entails a way of understanding the world that
is superior to alternatives like religion, politics, or art (Part I of the book),

that (2) unlike the ‘perceptions’ of laypersons, its claims about the world
do ‘neutrally’ and ‘objectively’ represent ‘the world as it really is’ (Part
II of the book), and that (3) scientific institutions and scientists deserve
authority for the scientific work they do (Part III of the book).
2 Scientism: Science as Secular Religion

2.1 Modern Science and Its Critics
Modern science emerged in the period from the fifteenth through the
seventeenth centuries, coinciding with major scientific breakthroughs
associated with the work of natural scientists like Copernicus, Kepler,
Galileo, and Newton (Dijksterhuis 1961; Toulmin 1990, 5–44). It
understood scientific truth as resulting from the combination of logical
reasoning and systematic empirical observation. This point of view was
popularized in the eighteenth century by Enlightenment thinkers like
Voltaire, Condorcet, Hume, and Montesquieu. They paved the way for
nineteenth-century pioneers of social science like Comte, Marx, Spencer,
and Freud, who connected the quest for scientific knowledge about the
foundations of human society with reformist political agendas. In that
era, the modern scientific worldview was in effect transformed into a
major cultural and political force as part of ‘a struggle by new social
and cultural elites to undermine aspects of the religious culture that
underpinned the institutions of the church, monarchy, and the ruling aris-
tocratic elite’ (Seidman 1994, 10). So it is here that the modern cultural
conflict between science and religion originates.
Central to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Enlightenment thought
was indeed a systematic critique of religion, tradition, and belief as
sources of ignorance and tutelage, with science conceived as their superior
successor, promising material and moral progress (Seidman 1994, 20–26).
In this Enlightenment understanding, scientific knowledge differs drasti-
cally from other types of knowledge and meaning in that it does not stem
from the human imagination, but from the careful and systematic study of
the world itself. This notion became one of the mainstays of the modern
self-image, which embraced science, rationality and technology as supe-
rior modes of relating to the world that would increasingly marginalize
tradition, religion and belief.
6 D. HOUTMAN ET AL.
The March for Science testifies that this modern self-understanding still
exists today, even though science has become increasingly contested. This
is of course not to suggest that it has ever been completely uncontested.
For since the heydays of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century,
it has always been viewed with suspicion, not least from within religious
circles, as Enlightenment critiques of religion would lead one to expect.
From the eighteenth century onwards, Romanticist critiques of science
have been equally significant and appear even more important nowadays
than religious ones, if only because the authority of religion is no longer
what it used to be, especially so in Western Europe.
European Romantics like Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778),
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), and William Wordsworth (1770–
1850) have since the end of the eighteenth century defended the
significance of the human imagination in tandem with feelings, experi-
ences and emotions against the imperatives of science and reason. At the
other side of the Atlantic, American Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo
Emerson (1803–1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) similarly
foregrounded the significance of subjectivity, intuition, and imagina-
tion. European Romanticism and American Transcendentalism do as such
understand truth as neither rooted in divine revelation, which would make
it a matter of religious belief, nor as resulting from logical reasoning
and empirical observation, which would make it a matter of scientific
reason. Both contrasting options are dismissed in favor of imagination
and experience.
2.2 Contesting the Authority of Science

In such a climate of clashes between Romanticism and the scientific
worldview, Max Weber crafted his Wissenschaftslehre at the beginning of
the twentieth century in Germany. It understands the scientific quest for
truth as just one particular way of relating to the world, the superiority
of which over religion, politics, morality, or aesthetics cannot be justi-
fied on strictly intellectual grounds. Weber rather observes that ‘the belief
in the value of scientific truth is the product of certain cultures and is
not a product of man’s original nature’ (Weber 2014 [1904], 137), so
that ‘scientific truth’ is not universally valid and binding to everyone, but
entails just ‘that which claims validity for all who seek truth’ (idem, 121;
emphasis in original, DH/SA/RL).
Invoking his well-known distinction between ‘how the world is’ and
‘how it should be,’ Weber limits the authority of science to claims about
the former, so that it cannot answer questions of meaning and purpose.
Science cannot tell what is good from what is bad and cannot tell what
courses of action ought to be pursued or rather abstained from. Answers
to moral questions like these can only be answered on the basis of the
moral worldviews that lie at the heart of religion and politics. Rather than
asserting the superiority of science over religion and politics, then, Weber
aims to ‘adjudicate the tensions between two vital Western traditions:
between reason and faith, between knowledge and feeling, between classi-
cism and romanticism, between the head and the heart’ (Gouldner 1962,
212–213), ‘attempting to guard the autonomy of both spheres’ (idem,
211). Acknowledging their incompatibility, but refusing to order them in
terms of superiority and inferiority, Weber thus robs science of its status
of be-all and end-all, dismissing scientistic understandings of science. The
Weberian account of science is as such not so much critical about reli-
gion and its cultural significance, but rather about the endowment of
science with an authority that makes it superior to it, as in Comtean-
style positivism. Indeed, as Alvin Gouldner has observed (idem, 211; see
also 1973), ‘(Weber’s) main campaign here is waged against science and
reason and is aimed at confining their influence. To Weber, even reason
must submit when conscience declares, Here I stand; I can do no other.’
In tandem with this modesty about the authority of science Weber
addresses the role of culture and values in the conduct of scientific
research. His principal point is not that values can and should be banned
from science, but indeed precisely the opposite. For scientific research
aims to address ‘issues that matter’ and ‘what matters’ is inevitably
informed by values and is as such a normative moral issue. The impli-
cation is that in this Weberian understanding scientific research cannot
and should not collect ‘the’ facts. It cannot do so, because ‘the’ facts
do not exist: due to the endless complexity of reality ‘the’ facts always
and inevitably entail an intellectually arbitrary yet culturally meaningful
selection from a much wider set of potential facts. It should not do so,
because ‘Any knowledge of infinite reality acquired by the finite human
mind is […] based on the tacit assumption that, in any given instance,
only a finite part of [that reality] should be the object of scientific
comprehension – should be “important” (in the sense of “worth knowing
about”)’ (Weber 2014 [1904], 114). This is what Weber calls the ‘value
relatedness’ (Wertbeziehung ) of scientific research.
8 D. HOUTMAN ET AL.
In Weber’s hands the conduct of scientific research thus comes to

resemble value-informed social action by non-scientists, even though
after having normatively defined what is ‘worth knowing’ methodolog-
ical craftsmanship and conformity to standards of intellectual integrity
take over. Yet, this guiding role of values in directing empirical research
does inevitably make research findings partial and one-sided. Even though
the researcher herself surely finds the registered facts ‘meaningful’ and
‘relevant,’ they are logically speaking only so for those who share her
value priorities. For all others they are less culturally significant than
a series of potential alternative facts that the researcher has decided
to bypass. The implication is that accusations of research being ‘one-
sided’ are intellectually meaningless, because it always and necessarily
is: ‘The belief that scientific work, as it progresses, should assume the
task of overcoming […] “one-sidedness” […] is flawed’ (Weber 2014
[1904], 111). Critical reproaches invoking the ‘one-sidedness’ of a scien-
tific study do as such merely assert a critic’s own value priorities (‘What
about power/inequality/race/class/gender/culture?’). These are norma-
tive issues of moral or political taste that can be neither dismissed nor
justified on strictly intellectual grounds.
A simple example demonstrates how neither normative standpoints
nor policy preferences can be defended by invoking ‘the’ facts. It is for
instance not too difficult to demonstrate in a methodologically sound
fashion that condom use protects against HIV/AIDS, but it is quite
another to invoke this ‘fact’ to defend the claim that condom use needs
to be encouraged and unprotected sex discouraged. For the study’s value-
informed definition of sex as a health risk is clearly one-sided. An equally
one-sided study that instead construes sex as a source of pleasure will
arguably produce a different ‘fact,’ i.e., that both men and women prefer
sex without condoms. While the former study thus makes reasons to
abstain from condom use invisible, the latter does the same with reasons
to protect oneself. Clearly, then, none of these studies can inform ‘policy
implications’ on strictly logical and empirical grounds.1
The most upfront public issue since early 2020, the COVID-19
pandemic, provides another example. For closures of retail stores, bars,
and restaurants to limit social contact cannot simply be justified by
epidemiological studies that demonstrate that such measures do effectively
help contain the pandemic. For it is of course not far-fetched to believe
that economic research can just as easily come up with evidence about the
detrimental economic effects of such measures, like increasing numbers
of bankruptcies and cases of unemployment. Neither is it hard to imagine

that sociologists could come up with research that shows such epidemio-
logically informed measures to negatively affect the quality of social life,
e.g., by impeding contact opportunities between family members, friends,
and co-workers. So here we have three types of studies that foreground
three different sets of scientifically informed facts; three types of facts that
suggest very different policy implications; and three sets of policy impli-
cations that—to put it in the terms of policy analysis—each create their
own ‘side effects,’ the latter all the more ‘undesirable’ if the one-sided
problem definition that invokes them is dismissed. The question is not
whether one of these sets of findings is any more ‘true’ than the others,
because obviously none of them is. The question is rather which of them
is most relevant, i.e., how health issues, economic issues, and social issues
need to be prioritized, which is a moral and political problem that science
cannot solve.
In Weber’s understanding, in short, it is inevitable that data are
collected and facts arrived at on the basis of intellectually arbitrary values
that define the ‘real’ problem, so that ‘the facts’ do not speak for them-
selves and do not have logically compelling implications for policies either.
So while science can surely produce facts, these facts can only inform
policies after the conditions they refer to have been interpreted as either
‘good’ or ‘bad’; a ‘pleasure’ or a ‘nuisance’; a ‘healthy’ condition or an
‘unhealthy’ one; a ‘social problem’ to be wiped out or a ‘blessing’ to
be cherished. Empirically established facts have no ‘intrinsic’ meaning,
because there is no such thing as a strictly ‘neutral,’ ‘scientific,’ or ‘log-
ical’ path from such facts to their moral evaluation, let alone to policy
measures.
Critics of scientism have time and again invoked similar arguments
since Weber’s days, albeit more often than not without observing the
marked continuity with the Weberian account of science. That science is
not a ‘mirror of nature’ (Rorty 1979) is meanwhile a mainstay in philos-
ophy of science, while the idea of ‘pure’ and ‘autonomous’ science, driven
by nothing but a disinterested passion for Truth has been deconstructed
by pointing out how racial and gender stereotypes impact scientific
research. Donna Haraway (1989) has for instance argued that studies
of primates’ reproductive and sexual behavior had traditionally unreflec-
tively reproduced gender stereotypes about aggressive males and receptive
females, a tendency that only came to be questioned after the discipline
had opened up to increasing numbers of female primatologists. Haraway’s
10 D. HOUTMAN ET AL.
(1988) more general argument is that scientific research inevitably gener-

ates ‘situated knowledge,’ marked by a ‘partial perspective’ that precludes
the God’s eye point of view assumed by absolute notions of Objectivity
and Truth. In making this argument Haraway has re-situated Sandra
Harding’s ‘standpoint theory,’ which has meanwhile sprawled a diversity
of standpoints on standpoint theory itself (Harding 2004). Science, this
postmodern feminist scholarship points out much like Weber did long
before, does not simply represent the world as it ‘really’ is, i.e., in a strictly
‘neutral,’ ‘objective,’ and culturally unmediated fashion.
2.3 The Counter Culture of the 1960s and the Postmodern Turn
This notion that science cannot represent the world in a strictly ‘neutral,’
‘objective,’ and culturally unmediated fashion was one of the mainstays
of the so-called ‘counter culture’ of the 1960s and 1970s. The latter
critiqued not only religion and tradition for standing in the way of
personal liberty and dreams of a better world, but reason and science, too.
Budding young academics and students with middle-class backgrounds
and leftist-liberal political profiles back then accused science of being
basically conservative politics in disguise. They critiqued science as the
handmaiden of ‘technocracy’ or ‘the system,’ both understood as forcing
people into slave-like existences as futile cogs in the rationalized modern
machine (see Marwick 1998; Roszak 1969; Musgrove 1974; Zijderveld
1970).
The young critics found much of their intellectual ammunition in
the works of the philosophers and sociologists of the Frankfurt School.
Adding sizable doses of Weber and Freud to Marxism, and no longer
seeing the cultural sphere as a mere superstructure that reflects an
economic infrastructure based on class power, authors like Fromm
(1941), Horkheimer and Adorno (2002 [1944]) and Marcuse (1964)
exchanged faith in an inevitable socialist revolution for the necessity of
liberation from ideological indoctrination. This entailed a profound trans-
formation of the old-school Marxism that claimed an objective scientific
status for itself. Whereas the latter ‘scientific Marxism’ charged its bour-
geois critics with betraying ideals of objectivity and impartiality and with
legitimizing the existing order and its reigning interests, the Frankfurters
rejected ‘the cult of objective fact as such, and not merely its alleged
misapplications’ (Gellner 1992, 33).
Thus, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002 [1944]), indeed a telling

title, Horkheimer and Adorno argued that reason had changed from an
emancipatory force into an oppressive one because it had gradually been
reduced to pure instrumentality and calculability. This had gone hand
in hand with the scientific reduction of ‘the world’ to a mere ensemble
of facts, studied by a positivism that equates ‘reality’ with ‘that what is’
and as such excludes the dimension of possibility or ‘that what could be.’
Marcuse (1964) unfolds a similar argument in One-Dimensional Man,
also critiquing the confinement of science, reason and truth to ‘that what
is’ and underscoring the importance of a thinking that dares to speculate
and open up new, emancipatory vistas. With this emphasis on the neces-
sity of conceiving attainable utopias that counter the weight of seemingly
neutral descriptions of existing reality, the Frankfurters targeted empirical
science’s ‘fact fetishism’ and gave a social twist to Romanticism’s belief in
the blessings of the faculty of imagination.
In line with this, the Frankfurters felt that those living in the West
people did not at all live free and happy lives in tolerant and democratic
societies, but were merely made to believe that they did. Hence Marcuse’s
(1964) argument that consciousness-raising and freeing one’s mind are
the conditions as much the goals of genuine political action. Horkheimer
and Adorno (2002 [1944]) similarly critiqued the ‘culture industries’
for keeping people in a shiftless, complacent, and uncritical state of half
sleep that veils harsh realities and seduces them into mistaking their alien-
ation for a state of satisfaction and happiness. These are indeed Romantic
notions that differ profoundly from old-school Marxism (Campbell 2007,
294–295; Josephson-Storm 2017, 209–239). They sounded like music to
the young countercultural protesters’ ears, witness slogans like ‘Power to
the imagination!’ and ‘If the theory doesn’t fit the facts, then that’s too
bad for the facts!’ Slogans like this still sound familiar today, even though
they now tend to come from the Trumpean right (Duncombe 2007).
The period from the 1980s onward then witnessed a cross-fertilization
of the heritage of the Frankfurt School with newly emerged French post-
structuralism (Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, Baudrillard, etcetera).
This produced the so-called postmodern turn in the humanities and social
sciences, meanwhile firmly institutionalized in the new transdisciplinary
field of cultural studies (Inglis 2007). This postmodernism also rejects
the epistemic authority of science. It underscores that there is no way to
‘neutrally’ or ‘objectively’ decide on the validity of competing knowledge
claims because the latter are inextricably bound up with incommensu-

rable cultural frames. Postmodernism does as such entail ‘the dissipation
of objectivity,’ as Zygmunt Bauman (1992, 35) puts it: ‘The element
most conspicuously absent is a reference to the supracommunal, “extrater-
ritorial” grounds of truth and meaning.’ Or in the words of Aronowitz
(1992, 258): ‘Postmodern thought […] is bound to discourse, liter-
ally narratives about the world that are admittedly partial. Indeed, one
of the crucial features of discourse is the intimate tie between knowl-
edge and interest, the latter being understood as a “standpoint” from
which to grasp “reality”.’ Culture is here hence regarded as consisting
of heterogeneous ‘language games’ (Lyotard 1984) or incommensurable
‘vocabularies’ (Rorty 1979; 1989) that compete and clash with each other
without the possibility of a fair and neutral settlement. ‘Once the veil
of epistemic privilege is torn away […], science appears as a social force
enmeshed in particular cultural and power struggles. The claim to truth,
as Foucault has proposed, is inextricably an act of power—a will to form
humanity,’ as Seidman (1991, 134–135) summarizes the postmodern
position.
This postmodern account of the inescapability of cultural pluralism
and of the impotence of science in overcoming it through a strictly
‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ representation of ‘reality as it really is’ echoes
Weber’s Wissenschaftslehre. Yet, while Weber crafted his doctrine of value
neutrality to protect science against the politicization this so easily gives
rise to, the latter is precisely what postmodernists encourage and cele-
brate. For postmodernism conceives itself as a ‘philosophy of difference’
that aims to defend subaltern groups against the totalizing claims of scien-
tific ‘meta-narratives’ that claim epistemological authority in the name of
social progress (through technology) or individual emancipation (through
Enlightenment) (Lyotard 1984). This postmodern defense of difference
by what its critics call ‘the academic left’ (Gross and Levitt 1994) informs
political engagements with the identity politics of new social move-
ments, especially the women’s, gay and lesbian and Black Lives Matter
movements.
Now such postmodern identity politics may be overwhelmingly leftist,
but it has despite obvious differences much in common with today’s
rightist populist, nationalist, and authoritarian identity politics, be it in
Europe, the United States, or elsewhere. The latter’s dreams of ethnic
and cultural sameness are similarly informed by notions of insurmountable
cultural difference, and it similarly invokes the utopian cultural imag-

ination in its struggles to overcome the injustices of actually existing
society (Canovan 1999). Also like its leftist counterpart it contests the
authority of science by hawking the superiority of direct personal expe-
rience, in this case by celebrating the practical insight of ‘the common
people,’ i.e., ‘what every person with just a modicum of common sense
knows’ (Taggart 2000, 95–98). The new populist right, in short, has
much in common with the postmodern identity politics of the left, with
the left-libertarian counter culture of the 1960s and 1970s, and with the
Romantic movement from the late-eighteenth century onwards. The basic
stance vis-à-vis science is much the same: that it is intellectually misguided
and morally wrong to conceive it as superior to non-scientific ways of
understanding the world. Contestations about the authority of science
are as such neither new nor necessarily ‘rightist’ and ‘authoritarian.’
3 Sociology of Science
and Sociology of Religion
Authority cannot simply be claimed or asserted, because it is ultimately
endorsed, assigned, dismissed, or withdrawn by those assumed, or just
hoped, to obey to it.2 Sociological studies of the authority of science
therefore need to give culture and meaning their full due, which is why
this book seeks theoretical inspiration from sociology of religion rather
than from Science and Technology Studies (STS). For while culture
has of course never been absent in the sociological study of science
(Callon 1995), the latter has nonetheless always treated it step-motherly,
certainly in comparison to the sociology of religion. This is exemplified
by Merton’s (1973 [1942]) classical account of the normative ethos of
science, which remains limited to the norms that guarantee the produc-
tion of objective and true knowledge and bypasses how culture influences
researchers’ problem selections, their theorizing, and their interpretations
of their research findings. Merton’s account thus sticks firmly to the posi-
tivist premise of science as the producer of objective and true knowledge
that basically mirrors a reality ‘out there.’
Without doubt, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolu-
tions (1962) entails the most influential break with this logic. For its
argument is that the truth-value of empirical evidence is never simply
‘given,’ but always informed by a ‘paradigm’ (e.g., Newtonian physics).
Such a paradigm entails a sort of worldview that defines a series of
taken-for-granted premises about the nature of reality and operates as a

regulatory framework in science. It as such delineates meaningful research
problems and provides coherent interpretations for research findings.
In their research training young scientists are taught to take its quasi-
metaphysical assumptions for granted, are familiarized with exemplars of
‘good science’ informed by it, and learn how to define and solve ‘good’
research problems. This results in practices of ‘normal science,’ with scien-
tists engaging in ‘puzzle-solving,’ typically without being reflexively aware
of the paradigm’s influence. Things start to change when research find-
ings start accumulating that the ruling paradigm cannot really make sense
of. Then a new paradigm that can do so replaces the old one, without
any guarantee that history will not repeat itself later on. Highlighting
the role of worldviews in the conduct of science and underscoring the
incommensurability of paradigms, Kuhn refers to such shifts as ‘scientific
revolutions.’
The work of the Edinburgh School in the Sociology of Scientific
Knowledge (SSK) has similarly much to offer to a cultural sociology of
science (e.g., Barnes 1974; Bloor 1976; Barnes, Bloor and Henry 1996).
More than that: it has inspired the influential ‘strong program in cultural
sociology,’ which does not necessarily remain limited to the study of
science (Alexander and Smith 2003). Bloor’s (1976) major contribution
lies in bringing scientific knowledge under the aegis of the sociology
of knowledge, which had traditionally confined itself to the study of
non-scientific knowledge like folk wisdoms and religious cosmologies.
To explain this remarkable and problematic self-limitation Bloor (1976,
46–54) invoked the Durkheimian notion of the sacred, pointing out
that treating scientific and non-scientific knowledge on equal footing
comes down to defiling the sacred: ‘Science is sacred, so it must be
kept apart […] (to protect) it from pollution which would destroy its
efficacy, authority and strength as a source of knowledge’ (idem, 49).
Precisely such a profanation of science defines Bloor’s (1976, 7) ‘strong
programme in the sociology of knowledge.’ For the latter is informed by
the principle of ‘symmetry,’ according to which sociology should remain
‘impartial with respect to truth and falsity, rationality or irrationality,
success or failure’ and should be ‘symmetrical in its style of explanation,’
in the sense that ‘the same types of cause would explain, say, true and
false beliefs’ (idem, 7). This principle of symmetry defines the actual truth
status of scientific truth claims as a sociological non-issue, which paves the
way for a less timid and more intellectually mature sociology of science,
not least a cultural sociology of science.
The Edinburgh School has however also stimulated studies about the
ways in which scientific, economic, and political interests influence the
production of scientific knowledge and technology (e.g., Barnes 1977)
that laid the foundations for Science and Technology Studies (STS) (e.g.,
Jasanoff et al. 1995). The latter has a marked interest in ‘science in action’
(Latour 1987), i.e., ethnographic studies of positive and medical scientists
at work in their laboratories, constructing scientific facts and technolo-
gies (Latour and Woolgar 1979). Such studies in STS have also pointed
out that scientific knowledge does not represent or mirror the world
directly and objectively, because in practice the process is much more
messy, involving a wide range of human and non-human ‘entities that
all contribute to scientific production: electrons and chromatographers,
the president of the United States and Einstein, physicians with their
assistants, the cancer research campaign, electron microscopes and their
manufactures’ (Callon 1995, 54). This insight has given rise to Actor-
Network-Theory (ANT) as a strictly symmetrical approach of networks
of human and non-human ‘actants’ (Latour 2005; see also Law 1987).
All this is however hardly useful for a cultural-sociological analysis of the
authority of science.3
Sociology of religion has indeed more to offer to the study of the
authority of science than Science and Technology Studies (STS), also due
to scientism’s status as religion’s secular counterpart. This is why we seek
our principal theoretical inspiration in this book from sociological theories
about the authority of religion. It is indeed often overlooked that religion
and science have more in common than typically acknowledged, because
‘the […] cognitive ethic of the Enlightenment […] shares with monothe-
istic exclusive scriptural religion the belief in the existence of a unique
truth, instead of an endless plurality of meaning-systems’ (Gellner 1992,
84). Religion and science do thus both assume the existence of culturally
unmediated truth, unpolluted by human understandings and prejudices—
‘real’ truth, binding to everyone. This does of course not mean that the
two are identical, because they are obviously not, neither ontologically (a
supernatural reality is not the same as an empirically observable reality),
nor epistemologically (belief is not the same as reason). Contrary to reli-
gion, in other words, science ‘repudiates the idea that [truth] is related
to a privileged Source, and could even be definitive’ (idem, 84).
The commonality of religion and science invokes a shared urge to

authoritatively assess the validity of lay beliefs. In science this pertains to
the latter’s rationality or irrationality, i.e., their truth or falsity according
to scientific standards; in religion it is their conformity to orthodoxy as
defined by God-revealed truth.4 This similarity between science and reli-
gion informs the special sensitivity in Science and Technology Studies
(STS) and sociology of religion alike to the problem of ‘going native,’
i.e., researchers blindly accepting and reproducing emic understandings
of truth and falsity. Both fields deal with this problem by refusing to priv-
ilege particular truth claims, while discrediting others as ‘false.’ Science
and Technology Studies (STS) bracket issues of (‘real’) truth by invoking
the abovementioned principle of ‘symmetry.’ Sociology of religion insists
on the principle of ‘methodological agnosticism’ (Furseth and Repstad
2006, 197–198), according to which sociology cannot and should not
evaluate the truth or falsity of religious doctrines (e.g., about the existence
or ontological qualities of the sacred) (see also Wilson 1982, 1–26).
In what follows we introduce three sociological theories about the
authority of religion and explain how they inform this book’s contribu-
tions about the authority of science vis-à-vis other social fields or realms
(Part I), the authority of scientific truth claims (Part II), and the authority
of scientific institutions (Part III).
4 Secularization and the Authority

of Religion and Science
4.1 Secularization and Pluralism
The secularization theory that became dominant in postwar sociology
is not one single and unitary thing, but not a hopelessly unstructured
mess either (Casanova 1994; Dobbelaere 1981; 2016; Tschannen 1991;
Wallis and Bruce 1992). It consists of theses about religious decline and
religious privatization. The thesis of religious decline holds that secular-
ization unfolds as a process in which more and more people become
less and less religious (e.g., Norris and Inglehart 2004). According to
the thesis of religious privatization, religiousness ceases to be the societal
default option, so that individuals become increasingly free to make their
own decisions about being religious or not, and if so, how exactly (e.g.,
Luckmann 1967; Taylor 2007). Religious decline and religious privati-

zation themselves are attributed to a more general process of structural
differentiation that coincides with an increase in pluralism.
Structural differentiation and cultural pluralization do as such entail
the virtually uncontested backbone of the theory of secularization. Reli-
gion, or so the argument goes, loses its authority to morally overarch
all of society as a sort of ‘sacred canopy,’ as Peter Berger (1967) has
influentially put it. A situation in which religion permeates basically all of
society, ranging from art to politics and from education to health care,
gives way to one in which these realms have become largely independent
from religion. Examples are the separation of church and state; science
becoming a strictly secular endeavor, free of religious interference; and
responsibilities in health care and education shifting from religious orders
to professionally trained experts. This results in a society with a range of
‘subsystems’ (or ‘fields’ if one prefers) that all follow their own partic-
ular institutional logic, independent of religion. While medieval art was
still basically religious art, and while religion and science were still inex-
tricably intertwined before the Renaissance, art and science alike have
meanwhile increasingly got rid of religious interference (e.g., Dobbelaere
2016; Wilson 1976; 1982). According to the theory of secularization,
then, due to structural differentiation and concomitant cultural pluralism
‘religion becomes a subsystem alongside other subsystems, losing in this
process its overarching claims over those other subsystems […] [so that]
the religious influence is increasingly confined to the religious subsystem
itself’ (Dobbelaere 2016, 2).
Secularization comes with an increased role of professional knowledge
and expertise, technology, and science, which has often been taken to
imply a concomitant increase in the authority of science (e.g., Iannac-
cone, Stark and Finke 1998; Stark and Finke 2000). People in the modern
West are as such held to act ‘more and more in terms of insight, knowl-
edge, controllability, planning and technique […]’ (Dobbelaere 1993, 15;
translated from Dutch), because ‘(f)or many young people, problems of
any kind have technical and rational solutions’ (Wilson 1982, 136). No
matter how much this notion is enshrined in the modern self-image and
in theories of modernization alike, however, an increased social signif-
icance of science does not logically necessitate a concomitant increase
in the authority of science. For just like religion science does of course
also find itself confronted with a range of subsystems with competing
logics and the theory of secularization lacks compelling arguments why it
would unlike religion end up in the privileged and authoritative position

of providing an overarching ‘meta-logic.’
Whether authority of religion does in the course of the seculariza-
tion process give way to authority of science is in fact an open question,
and indeed a pivotal one, even though sociologists of religion have
almost consistently overlooked it by taking the affirmative answer for
granted. Yet, modern conditions of pluralism may erode the authority
of science even more than that of religion. For a science that actively
claims an authoritative status sits uneasily with the notion that it is
bound to the ‘truth imperative’ (Goudsblom 1980), which confines its
authority to nothing but strictly empirical and logical analysis (Weber
2014 [1904]). This imperative moreover prescribes a firm commitment
to doubt, critique, and debate, which rules out unassailable truth claims
and dogmas (Gellner 1992, 84). While this makes it less likely that science
will actually claim the privileged status of a new overarching ‘meta-logic’
in the first place, its openness to doubt, critique, and debate moreover
suggests that even if it does, it will face major difficulties in defending itself
against competitors vying for its authority. Indeed, as Colin Campbell
(2002 [1972], 24) has observed:
while the decline in power of organized ethical religion appears to have

removed the most effective control over heretical religious beliefs, a growth
in the prestige of science results in the absence of control of the beliefs of
non-scientists and in an increase in quasi-scientific beliefs.
This does indeed resemble the situation that contemporary science finds
itself in, plagued by ‘quasi-scientific beliefs’ that question its authority.
4.2 Part I: Scientific Authority in the Face of Pluralism

The first part of this book, ‘Scientific Authority in the Face of Pluralism,’
addresses the authority of science vis-à-vis other fields. Dick Houtman
(Chapter 2) argues that disenchantment in the classical sense of Max
Weber transforms the intellectual realm as much as the religious one.
Discussing changes since the 1960s within sociology itself, he demon-
strates how the process has eroded much of its former pretension of being
able to ‘discover’ the truth about human society—the ‘real’ truth, solidly
and reliably grounded beyond the cultural imagination. This has liber-
ated culture from its subaltern status as a realm of mere ‘perceptions,’
amenable to correction by sociological knowledge about how things

‘really’ stand. Discarding such inflated claims to scientific authority, soci-
ology has instead come to understand culture as a vital aspect of social
life in and of itself that does as such demand serious research attention.
The discipline has in the process ended up in a position that is strikingly
similar to the one secularization theory has always envisaged for religion,
i.e., as lacking any special authority beyond its own realm.
Stef Aupers and Lars de Wildt (Chapter 3) point out that the ortho-
doxies of modern science have always been challenged by their heterodox
counterparts. Yet, while heterodox science was traditionally an endeavor
by intellectual counter elites, the rise of the Internet has made it possible
for the public at large to join in, which has happened on a large scale.
The relevant web forums and online communities boast radical distrust
vis-à-vis established science and spark ‘truth wars’ between trained scien-
tific experts representing orthodox science and their heterodox amateur
counterparts. Now while orthodox science has always faced the need to
defend itself against heterodox challengers, discrediting today’s critics
by branding them ‘irrational pseudo-scientists’ is far from easy. For
today’s web forums and online communities are not only hotbeds where
heterodox science is actively discussed, developed, and disseminated, but
they are also environments where deviant scientific ideas are powerfully
socially and algorithmically consolidated and sustained, even to the extent
that radicalization becomes likely.
Rudi Laermans (Chapter 4) addresses how the universities have mean-
while opened up to arts-based research, which produces a type of
knowledge that differs profoundly from traditional scientific knowledge.
As a manifestation of the arts’ ‘regime of singularity’ this knowledge is
unavoidably experience- and practice-based and informed by the personal
experiences and subjectivity of the artist. Such knowledge cannot be
reconciled with the standards that traditionally underpin the authority of
science, i.e., non-singular conceptual rationalism, methodological rigor,
replication and peer control, and contribution to the accumulation of
knowledge. Advocates of arts-based research do therefore emphasize the
particularity and distinct epistemic nature of artistic knowledge to endow
it with an epistemic status that differs from science, yet does meet generic
academic—not: scientific—standards. They do as such not straightfor-
wardly reject the authority of science, yet repudiate the notion that it has
a monopoly on worthwhile knowledge. In doing so, they invoke more
broadly defined academic standards that enable them to neither give in
on the particularity of art nor dismiss the authority of science. That the
resulting ‘academization of the arts’ has occurred without much opposi-
tion from adherents of the traditional epistemic ideals of science testifies
to the relativization of the authority of science in academia.
5 Cultural Worldviews and the Authority

of Scientific Truth Claims
5.1 Max Weber and Emile Durkheim on Religion and Meaning
Despite their otherwise major differences, not least their understandings
of what religion ‘is’ and ‘does,’ the classical sociologies of religion of
Max Weber and Emile Durkheim do both address the significance of
religion beyond a strictly defined religious realm. More specifically, they
both foreground the role of religious worldviews in endowing the world
with meaning, i.e., in distinguishing between what is ‘good’ and what
is ‘bad,’ and in pointing out the action repertoires that the religiously
pious should pursue or rather stay away from.5 Unlike the theory of secu-
larization discussed above, this second theory can as such not account
for the endorsement or rejection of the authority of science as a field in
and of itself, but rather for why religiously (or more generally: culturally)
defined groups differ as to the types of truth claims they tend to accept
as unbiased and valid or reject as false and invalid.
Weber’s comparative and historical analysis of the world religions
aims to demonstrate that, and explain why, the inner-worldly asceti-
cism of sixteenth-century Puritan Protestantism, especially Calvinism,
contributed to the breakthrough of rationalized modernity in the West,
especially modern entrepreneurship and capitalism. This is so, Weber
argues, because a sort of positive cultural resonance (Wahlverwandtschaft ,
typically translated as ‘elective affinity’) exists between the Protestant
ideal of a sober, disciplined and economically active lifestyle on the one
hand and on the other hand the spirit of modern capitalist entrepreneur-
ship, defined by its incessant goal-rational handling of capital and other
production factors. Other world religions, like Buddhism, Hinduism
and Confucianism, had very different consequences, because they were
either mystical rather than ascetic and/or other-worldly rather than
inner-worldly. They as such discouraged rather than stimulated mundane
economic activities (Weber 1946 [1921]; 1963 [1922]). Weber’s most
famous study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2005
[1904/05]), hence addresses just one single link within a much more
extensive account of the economic consequences of the world religions
(Collins 2007).
In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995 [1912]) the late,
cultural-sociological Durkheim similarly addresses religion’s consequences
beyond a strictly defined religious realm. In doing so, Durkheim came
back full circle to the position that he had initially dismissed in The Divi-
sion of Labor in Society (1964 [1893]). For this early, positivist Durkheim
still argued that religion could only provide cultural cohesion and soli-
darity in pre-modern society (‘mechanical solidarity’), so that its modern
counterpart could only be based on ‘organic solidarity,’ brought about by
an awareness of the interdependencies that come with the modern divi-
sion of labor. The late Durkheim, however, maintains that all societies,
pre-modern and modern alike, are held together by a common religion,
understood as a group-based ‘unified system of beliefs and practices rela-
tive to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden’ (1995
[1912], 44). In this understanding religion does hence not necessarily
refer to supernatural beings, but rather to something deemed so special
and important that it needs to be set apart, celebrated, and protected
against pollution by the mundane and the everyday. In Durkheim’s hands
religion thus pertains to collectively held beliefs about what sets ‘the
sacred’ apart from ‘the profane’ and to ritual practices aimed at protecting
the former from pollution by the latter.
Even though the Weberian and Durkheimian accounts of religion are
often counterposed, or even portrayed as excluding each other, then,
they do both bring out that religious worldviews have implications that
stretch beyond a narrowly defined religious realm. This is because reli-
gious worldviews are in both instances held to tell the pious what is good
or pure and what is bad or impure, and to inform them about the action
repertoires they are expected to pursue and abstain from. Religious world-
views (or more generally: cultural ones) do as such also define distinctions
between those scientific truth claims that sustain the good, the pure, and
the sacred, and those that rather pose a profane threat to it. Cultural
worldviews thus lead the former to be embraced and cherished and the
latter to be neglected, discarded, and dismissed. Whereas Weber’s and
Durkheim’s sociologies of culture and religion differ profoundly in other
respects, in short, they do nonetheless both suggest that cultural world-
views matter a lot when it comes to the acceptance or dismissal of scientific
truth claims.
Contemporary theories about ‘post-truth,’ i.e., truth claims accepted

without reference to scientific evidence, lead to much the same expec-
tation for basically the same reasons. The best known of these theories
address ‘confirmation bias’ (Nickerson 1998), ‘motivated reasoning’
(Kunda 1990), and ‘avoidance of cognitive dissonance’ (Festinger 1962).
‘Confirmation bias’ and ‘motivated reasoning’ do like Weberian posi-
tive elective affinity and Durkheimian celebration of the sacred refer to
the tendency to positively appreciate information that is compatible with
pre-existing beliefs. ‘Avoidance of cognitive dissonance,’ on the other
hand, entails the logical counterpart of confirmation bias and motivated
reasoning, i.e., the tendency to try and avoid feelings of discomfort
invoked by information that appears to challenge one’s pre-existing beliefs
(see, e.g., Manjoo 2008). This can as such also be understood in terms
of either negative elective affinity (Weber) or preventing the profane from
polluting the sacred (Durkheim).6
5.2 Part II: Cultural Worldviews and the Authority of Scientific

Truth Claims
The second part of this book addresses how cultural worldviews evoke
or discourage interest in and affinity with particular types of scientific
truth claims, leading to the latter’s acceptance or dismissal. Liza Cortois
and Anneke Pons-de Wit (Chapter 5) demonstrate that the contrasting
religious worldviews of mindfulness and conservative Protestantism do
both spark an interest in neuroscientific research about the plasticity of
the brain. Yet, their different elective affinities with neuroscience direct
their adherents toward different types of neuroscientific insights. Whereas
mindfulness aficionados gravitate toward insights according to which the
brain can be ‘improved’ through meditation, conservative Protestants are
primarily interested in how modern digital media can ‘damage’ the brain.
Paul Tromp and Peter Achterberg (Chapter 6) then present evidence of
the role of political worldviews in lay understandings of truth and falsity.
Following in the footsteps of Douglas and Wildavsky (1982) they demon-
strate firstly that those with rightist-conservative political profiles are less
likely to believe in the actual occurrence of global warming than their
leftist-progressive counterparts. Using experimentally manipulated news
reports about research findings that appear to contradict climate change,
they then show that those with leftist-progressive political profiles do with
both hands seize evidence that these findings may be compatible with the
scientific consensus of actually occurring climate change after all. This

means that not only the authority assigned to research findings, but even
the interpretation of the scientific consensus within which these findings
are launched, is informed by political worldviews.
Like those reported in the previous chapter, then, these findings
demonstrate that cultural worldviews matter a lot when it comes to
endowing scientific truth claims with authority rather than neglecting or
dismissing them. The findings of this chapter do in fact even go a step
further than those of the previous one, because they demonstrate that
people with different worldviews do not only have their own particular
pet research findings, but do even evaluate the truth status of the very
same facts on the basis of their cultural worldview.
6 Contestations of the Authority

of Scientific Institutions
6.1 The Spiritual Turn in Religion
Since the end of the twentieth century sociology of religion has witnessed
the emergence of a theory about a ‘spiritual turn’ in religion. It does not
so much posit a decline of religion per se as part of a more general process
of secularization, but rather that religious institutions have lost much of
their former authority (e.g., Davie 1994; Heelas and Woodhead 2005;
Houtman and Mascini 2002; Houtman and Aupers 2007; Tromp, Pless
and Houtman 2020). This theory accounts for the increasing numbers
of Westerners who self-identify as ‘spiritual but not religious,’ producing
utterances like, ‘No, I am not religious; I want to follow my personal
spiritual path’ or ‘I do not believe in God, but I do believe that there
is “something”.’ On the basis of such evidence Heelas and Woodhead
(2005) have suggested that a ‘spiritual revolution’ may be underway,
consisting of a major transition from ‘religion’ to ‘spirituality,’ while
Campbell (2007, 41) even goes so far as to observe ‘a fundamental revo-
lution in Western civilisation, one that can be compared in significance to
the Renaissance, the Reformation, or the Enlightenment.’
This spiritual turn entails the dissemination of a specific type of
religious discourse that dismisses religion’s traditional organizational-
institutional entrapments. It posits that the sacred cannot be captured
in human-made institutions, because the latter are ultimately profane;
i.e., false, shoddy, mundane, human-made, and ‘invented’ side issues
that distract from what religion is (or rather: should be) ‘really’ about:
engaging in personal contact with the sacred (Roeland et al. 2010). Reli-
gious institutions are as such accused of placing too much emphasis on
institutional and ritual side issues and of wrongly conceiving the religious
traditions they embody as different from, conflicting with, and superior
to others. This critique informs the spiritual notion of ‘polymorphism’
(Campbell 1978, 149) or more typically ‘perennialism,’ which holds that
what religious traditions have in common is more important than what
sets them apart (‘There are many paths, but there is just one truth’).
Today’s spiritual discourse thus rests on a binary distinction between
‘spirituality’ and ‘institutional religion,’ conceived as ‘real’ respectively
‘false’ religion, a distinction that is basically uncontested among those
who self-identify as ‘spiritual, but not religious.’ Spirituality does as such
entail a type of religion that dismisses institutions, foregrounds a personal
connection with the divine, and underscores the significance of personal
spiritual experience. All this gives rise to the practices of personal brico-
lage, syncretism, and spiritual seeking that have since Thomas Luckmann’s
The Invisible Religion (1967) more often than not been misconstrued as
strictly privatized (see for critiques: Aupers and Houtman 2006; Besecke
2005; Woodhead 2010). For in fact contemporary spirituality entails
an excellent illustration of religion in the classical Durkheimian sense,
i.e., religion as a shared cultural discourse that is organized around a
binary distinction between ‘the sacred’ and ‘the profane’ (here: religious
institutions) (Alexander 1988; Durkheim 1995 [1912]).
6.2 Part III: Contesting the Authority of Scientific Institutions

Such contestations of institutions do not remain confined to religion, as
can for instance be seen in populist critiques of party-centered politics
and neglect of what ought to be central to democratic politics, i.e., the
interests of ‘the people’ (e.g., Canovan 1999; Houtman, Laermans and
Simons 2021). Critiques of the institutional bulwarks of science should
similarly not be mistaken for contestations of the authority of science per
se. For universities and research institutes are often critiqued for giving up
on ‘real’ science, for betraying scientific ideals of democratic and critical
openness, for engaging in submissive ‘Big Science’ and selling out to ‘Big
Corporations’ and ‘Big Government.’7 Part III of this book thus demon-
strates that today’s contestations of the authority of scientific institutions
should not be confused with contestations of the authority of science per
se. Indeed, the former are often informed by normative ideals of ‘real’
science, i.e., ‘science as it should be.’
Massimiliano Simons (Chapter 7) discusses the Do-It-Yourself biology
movement, also known as ‘garage biology,’ ‘kitchen biology,’ ‘bio-
hacking,’ or ‘biopunk.’ It engages in biological research outside scientific
institutions, even though many of those concerned have academic creden-
tials. DIY biology is not at all ‘against’ science, but profoundly dislikes the
ways in which authoritarian, routinized scientific institutions with their
stifling bureaucracy and disturbing office politics straightjacket science
in close collaboration with multinational corporations and state actors.
Informed by the anti-institutional ethos of the countercultural computer
hacker movement it boasts ideals of democratic openness, open source,
sharing of resources, and decentralization. It dreams of liberating science
from its institutional entrapments, of democratizing research by making
it accessible to everyone, and of reawakening the sheer spirit of pleasure,
fun, and creativity held to lie at the heart of science. The dream of DiY
biology is one of ‘science without scientists.’
Jaron Harambam and Stef Aupers (Chapter 8) then present findings
from an ethnographic study of conspiracy theorists, who are vociferously
present among today’s critics of science. Typically branded by scientists as
dangerous, irrational and deluded loonies, they do however not reject the
scientific endeavor per se either, but rather accuse modern universities,
research institutes, and the scientists they employ of being insufficiently
scientific. They feel that science lacks a skeptical, open-minded, and crit-
ical edge and pride themselves on being less dogmatic and more critical
than the typical academic scientist or scientific expert. Much like DIY
biology, then, they accuse the universities of having degenerated into
dull, routinized research factories that stand in the way of the free spirit
of science: lost in bureaucratic and economic side issues, enlisted by
powerful states and corporations, and in effect no longer hospitable to
‘real’ science, driven by open-mindedness and curiosity.
Finally, Peter Achterberg, Willem de Koster, and Jeroen van der Waal
(Chapter 9) analyze survey data to demonstrate that, unlike what is often
believed, the lower educated embrace ideals of unbiased scientific research
as much as the higher educated do. They also show, however, that those
concerned are more skeptical than the higher educated are about whether
everyday scientific practices do actually live up to these ideals. Distrust of
science among the lower educated does as such not entail a rejection of
the scientific endeavor per se. It remains limited to the institutional side
of science and does moreover stem from their well-documented lack of
trust in institutions in general, so certainly not only scientific ones.
7 Conclusion: Science Under Siege

Today’s contestations of the authority of science are too interesting and
too intellectually significant to be merely mourned and protested against.
For it is clear that they sit quite uneasily with the long-standing notions
of a fundamental dissimilarity and conflict between religion and science
(Evans and Evans 2008) and of social change as resulting from a ‘warfare
of science with theology’ (White 1960) or a ‘religion/science conflict’
(Sappington 1991). According to such understandings, the unfolding of
modernity results in a displacement of religion by science, i.e., a transition
from authority of religion to authority of science, a notion that informs
sociological theories of modernization.
Today’s contestations of the authority of science suggest that soci-
ologists need to be more skeptical about such claims than they have
traditionally been. The authority of religion has since the 1960s surely
declined significantly in most Western-European countries (e.g., Brown
2001; Bruce 2002; Norris and Inglehart 2004), and also—though less
typically acknowledged—in the United States (Voas and Chaves 2016).
Sociologists have however tended to accept the notion that this process
has coincided with an increase in the authority of science as an article of
faith rather than a scientific hypothesis in need of critical empirical testing.
For the sobering fact is that as yet hardly any research has systematically
addressed this pivotal question (see for an exception Gauchat 2012).
Today’s contestations of the authority of science may indeed indi-
cate that accounts of a declining authority of religion tell only half the
story. What may have eroded instead is something more general and
more fundamental, i.e., the acceptance of universally binding truth claims,
be they religiously or scientifically informed. Such a dual decline of the
authorities of religion and science alike does not signal a process of ‘mod-
ernization,’ but rather one of ‘postmodernization,’ with religion and
science alike losing their former authority (e.g., Bauman 1987; 1992;
Inglehart 1997). Precisely because such a process entails a major rupture
with how the modern West has traditionally understood itself and its
further development, there is ample reason to open up this issue for
systematic empirical study.
Yet, as we have seen, lamentation, disapproval, and political protest

are the more typical responses, with scientists, politicians, and journalists
bemoaning ‘anti-intellectual’ currents and critiquing those who ‘irra-
tionally’ refuse to accept the authority of science. These are textbook
examples of ‘boundary work’ (Gieryn 1983; 1999): they create an asym-
metrical divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and in so doing re-assert precisely
the pretensions of modern science that are so heavily contested nowa-
days.8 Such boundary work moreover obscures that similar critiques of
science are expressed from within academia itself, too, not least from
within the humanities and the social sciences, and not least about the
instrumentalization of science and its subordination to vested political and
economic interests. A more fundamental reflection thus appears called for.
Unlike academic prophets of doom have it, eradicating misplaced
pretensions of strictly objective and unmediated truth may not so much
lead to the end of science, but rather open the door to a better science—
a science that is more critical of long-standing scientific practices and
self-understandings that impede the quest for truth. Indeed, as one of
the sociological pioneers of the study of science already pointed out
amidst World War II, long before the unrest that would break out at the
academic front in the 1960s: ‘An institution under attack must reexamine
its foundations, restate its objectives, seek out its rationale. Crisis invites
self-appraisal’ (Merton 1973 [1942], 267).
Notes
1. The picture does of course become even more complex if one realizes that
there are likely to be many other reasons for (non-)use of contraceptives
than sexual pleasure and avoidance of sexually transmitted diseases. Men
may for instance define condom use as ‘un-manly’ and deny women’s right
to go against their male wishes and desires, perhaps especially so in non-
Western settings.
2. Needless to say, we here follow Max Weber’s (1978 [1921/22], 215) clas-
sical conceptualization of authority as ‘legitimate domination,’ according
to which ‘the validity of […] claims to legitimacy’ does inevitably rest on
either ‘belief’ (legal and traditional authority) or ‘devotion’ (charismatic
authority).
3. The sociological study of science does of course not discard culture alto-
gether, as can be seen from Donna Haraway’s work on the situatedness
of knowledge (Haraway 1988) and Sandra Harding’s standpoint theory
(2004) cited above (see also Callon 1995). Karin Knorr-Cetina also takes
culture much more seriously than STS generally, and ANT in particular.
Her work about ‘epistemic cultures’ that drive knowledge production in
fields like molecular biology and particle physics does indeed entail an
elaboration of Kuhn’s classical work on the role of paradigms in science
(Knorr-Cetina 1999). Another good example is Sheila Jasanoff’s work
about how distinct national risk cultures affect the regulation of genetic
engineering and medicine research in the USA and Europe (2012, 23–
41, 133–149) and about ‘sociotechnical imaginaries,’ i.e., ‘collectively held,
institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures,
animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order
attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology’
(Jasanoff 2015, 4).
4. This similarity between religion and science applies especially to the
more orthodox strains of western-style Abrahamic revelation religions like
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam on the one hand and the natural sciences
(and varieties of social science modeled after the latter) on the other
(Furseth and Repstad 2006, 197–208).
5. Precisely this common notion that religion informs people’s cultural under-
standings of the world, and in effect drives their lifestyles, too, makes
the classical sociologies of religion of Weber and Durkheim such valu-
able blueprints for cultural sociology (e.g., Alexander 1988; Houtman and
Achterberg 2016).
6. Despite these marked convergences between Weber’s and Durkheim’s clas-
sical accounts and these three modern theories, the latter are positivist
theories, informed by distinctions between knowledge about ‘reality as it
really is’ and ‘culture and belief.’ They do as such entail moral condem-
nations of deviations from rationalism and assume the possibility and
superiority of strictly ‘unbiased,’ ‘non-motivated’ reasoning and ‘objective’
knowledge. The cultural-sociological Weberian and Durkheimian accounts
do not imply such moralism, as for these this is simply how social life
inevitably works, whether one likes it or not.
7. Note that such critiques are not only voiced by external critics of contem-
porary universities and research institutes, but are also expressed within the
academy itself as discontents about the ways in which neoliberal evalua-
tion and funding regimes straightjacket, trivialize, and commodify scientific
research.
8. There are indeed good reasons to be skeptical about such un-reflexive
moralistic dismissals of public discontents about science and about luke-
warm attempts at restoring public trust in science. The latter typically
take shape as ‘citizen science,’ with universities and governmental bodies
involving citizens in scientific research (e.g., Riesch and Potter 2014). For
despite the aura of democratic and participatory ideals, it is hard to see
how the deployment of citizens in unpaid data collection could unsettle
misplaced scientistic pretensions of science entailing a superior way of

relating to the world that provides strictly neutral, objective, and culturally
unmediated truth.
References
Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1988. “Introduction: Durkheimian Sociology and Cultural
Studies Today.” In Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies, by Jeffrey C.
Alexander, 1–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Philip Smith. 2003. “The Strong Program in Cultural
Sociology: Elements of a Structural Hermeneutics.” In The Meanings of Social
Life: A Cultural Sociology, by Jeffrey C. Alexander, 11–26. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Aronowitz, Stanley. 1992. The Politics of Identity: Class, Culture, Social Move-
ments. London: Routledge.
Aupers, Stef, and Dick Houtman. 2006. “Beyond the Spiritual Supermarket:
The Social and Public Significance of New Age Spirituality.” Journal of
Contemporary Religion 21 (2): 201–22.
Barnes, Barry. 1974. Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory. London:
Routledge.
Barnes, Barry. 1977. Interests and the Growth of Knowledge. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Barnes, Barry, David Bloor, and John Henry. 1996. Scientific Knowledge: A
Sociological Analysis. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 1987. Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-
modernity and Intellectuals. Cambridge: Polity.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 1992. “Introduction: The Re-Enchantment of the World,
or, How Can One Narrate Postmodernity?” In Intimations of Postmodernity,
vii–xvii. London: Routledge.
Berger, Peter L. 1967. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociology of Religion.
New York: Doubleday.
Besecke, Kelly. 2005. “Seeing Invisible Religion: Religion as a Societal Conver-
sation about Transcendent Meaning.” Sociological Theory 23 (2): 179–96.
Bloor, David. 1976. Science and Social Imagery. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Brown, Callum G. 2001. The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding
Secularisation, 1800–2000. London: Routledge.
Bruce, Steve. 2002. God Is Dead: Secularisation in the West. Oxford: Blackwell.
Brulle, Robert J. 2018. “Critical Reflections on the March for Science.”
Sociological Forum 33 (1): 255–8.
Callon, Michel. 1995. “Four Models for the Dynamics of Science.” In Handbook
of Science and Technology Studies, edited by Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald E. Markle,
James C. Petersen, and Trevor Pinch, 29–63. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Campbell, Colin. 1978. “The Secret Religion of the Educated Classes.” Sociolog-
ical Analysis 39 (2): 146–56.
Campbell, Colin. 2002 [1972]. “The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization.”
In The Cultic Milieu: Oppositional Subcultures in an Age of Globalization,
edited by Jeffrey Kaplan and Heléne Lööw, 12–25. Walnut Creek: Altamira
Press.
Campbell, Colin. 2007. The Easternization of the West: A Thematic Account of
Cultural Change in the Modern Era. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.
Canovan, Margaret. 1999. “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of
Democracy.” Political Studies 47 (1): 2–16.
Casanova, José. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Collins, Randall. 2007. “The Classical Tradition in Sociology of Religion.” In
The Sage Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, edited by James A. Beckford
and N.J. Demerath III, 19–38. Los Angeles: Sage.
Davie, Grace. 1994. Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Dijksterhuis, E.J. 1961. The Mechanization of the World Picture. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Dobbelaere, Karel. 1981. Secularization: A Multi-Dimensional Concept. London:
Sage.
Dobbelaere, Karel. 1993. “Individuele godsdienstigheid in een geseculariseerde
samenleving.” [Individual Religiousness in a Secularized Society]. Tijdschrift
voor Sociologie 14 (1): 5–29.
Dobbelaere, Karel. 2016. “Secularization.” In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Soci-
ology, edited by George Ritzer. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. https://
doi.org/10.1002/9781405165518.wbeoss064.pub2.
Douglas, Mary, and Aaron Wildavsky. 1982. Risk and Culture: An Essay on
the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers. Berkeley and Los
Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Duncombe, Stephen. 2007. Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age
of Fantasy. New York: New Press.
Durkheim, Emile. 1964 [1893]. The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free
Press.
Durkheim, Emile. 1995 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New
York: Free Press.
Evans, John H., and Michael S. Evans. 2008. “Religion and Science: Beyond the
Epistemological Conflict Narrative.” Annual Review of Sociology 34: 87–105.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
some difficulty in identifying the descendants of Lieutenant Thomas
Allen, or Red Eagle, who mistook himself for a never-existing son of
the once ‘young Chevalier.’ Perhaps the countship of Albany is not
the exclusive possession of Lieutenant Allen’s descendants. It is at
least certain that, a couple of years ago, there was some talk in
London of a Count and Countess ‘d’Albanie,’ in Hungary, but what
their pretensions were has gone out of memory; but they must,
rightly or wrongly, have had some, if the tale be true that they quitted
a small estate there, somewhat offended, because the bishop of the
diocese had refused to allow them to sit in the sanctuary of some
church, on purple velvet chairs!
In all this affair Lieutenant Thomas Allen may FULLER
deserve rather to be pitied than blamed. That he was PARTICULARS.
under a delusion seems undeniable. The immediate
victims of it, his sons, do not forfeit respect for crediting a father’s
assertions. They or their descendants must not expect the world to
have the same confidence in them.
A clear and comprehensive view of this family matter may be
acquired by perusing the following statement, which appeared in
‘Notes and Queries,’ July 28th, 1877, and which is from one who
speaks with knowledge and authority.
‘When James Stuart, Count d’Albanie, died, he left two sons and
one daughter.’
To understand this starting point aright, the reader should
remember that the above-named James Stuart was originally known
as Lieutenant Thomas Allen, second son of Admiral Allen. The two
sons and one daughter are thus enumerated:—
‘1st. John Sobieski Stuart, Count d’Albanie,

2nd. Count Charles Edward d’Albanie.
3rd. Countess Catherine Matilda d’Albanie.’
The first of the three was the author of poems published in 1822,
as written by John Hay Allen. Both those gentlemen subsequently
became authors of works, under the name of Stuart.
‘The elder son, John Sobieski, Count d’Albanie,
THE STUART-
married the eldest surviving daughter of Edward D’ALBANIES.
Kendall, of Osterey (vide Burke’s ‘Landed Gentry,’
under Kendall of Osterey), and died, leaving no children.
‘The second son, Charles Edward Stuart, now Count d’Albanie,
married Anna Beresford, daughter of the Hon. and Right Hon. John
Beresford, second son of Marcus Beresford, Earl of Tyrone, and
brother of the first Marquis of Waterford, and by her had four
children.
‘1st. Count Charles Edward d’Albanie, major in the Austrian
Cavalry, in which he served from 1840 to 1870, when he left the
service and came to England, and in 1874 married Lady Alice Mary
Hay, sister of the present and eighteenth Earl of Errol.
‘2nd. Countess Marie, who died at Beaumanoir on the Loire, on
the 22nd of August, 1873, and was buried in the cemetery of St. Cyr
sur Loire.
‘3rd. Countess Sobieska Stolberg, married Edouard Platt de Platt,
in the Austrian Imperial Body Guard, and has one son, Alfred
Edouard Charles.
‘4th. The Countess Clementina, a nun.
‘The Countess Catherine Matilda, daughter of JACOBITE
James Count d’Albanie’ (that is, of the gentleman first LORD
known as Admiral Allen’s son), ‘married Count CAMPBELL.
Ferdinand de Lancastro, by whom she had one son,
Count Charles Ferdinand Montesino de Lancastro et d’Albanie, from
his mother. He also served in the Austrian army, in the Kaiser
Kürassier Regiment, or Imperial Cuirassiers, of which the emperor is
colonel. He volunteered, by permission of the emperor, Franz
Joseph, into the Lancers of the Austrian Army Corps which
accompanied the Arch-Duke Maximilian to Mexico, and during the
three years’ campaign he received four decorations for valour in the
many actions at which he was present, two of which were given to
him by the Emperor Maximilian, one being the Gold Cross and Eagle
of the Order of Ste. Marie de Guadalupe, and two by the Emperor
Napoleon III., and also four clasps. After the campaign terminated,
he returned to Austria with his regiment, and got leave to visit his
uncle, the present Count d’Albanie, then in London, where he died
on the 28th September, 1873, from inflammation of the lungs, at the
age of twenty-nine years and five days.’ (Signed ‘R. I. P.’)
Some adherents to the cause of the Stuarts have LORD
survived to the present reign, and one at least may be CAMPBELL,
found who was keeper of the sovereign’s conscience, ON OLD
and sat on the woolsack. It is certainly somewhat JUDGMENTS.
remarkable to find that one of Her Majesty’s chancellors was not only
a Jacobite at heart, like Johnson in part of the Georgian Era, but
openly expressed, that is, printed and published, his opinions. In
Lord Campbell’s life of Lord Cowper, the lord chancellor who
presided at the trial of the rebel lords in 1716, the biographer alludes
to the new Riot Act brought in by Cowper, in which it was stated that
if as many, or as few, as a dozen persons assembled together in the
streets, and did not disperse within an hour after a magistrate’s order
to that effect, the whole dozen would incur the penalty of death, and
might be lawfully strangled at Tyburn. ‘This,’ says Lord Campbell,
‘was perhaps a harsher law than ever was proposed in the time of
the Stuarts,’ but he adds that it was not abused in practice, yet,
nevertheless, ‘it brought great obloquy upon the new dynasty.’ Lord
Cowper in charging and in sentencing the rebel lords in 1716, and
Lord Hardwicke, in addressing and passing judgment upon the rebel
lords in 1746, could scarcely find terms harsh enough to express the
wickedness, barbarity, and hellish character of the rebellion and of
the lords who were the leaders in it. As to their own disgust at such
unmatched infamy, like Fielding’s Noodle, they could scarcely find
words to grace their tale with sufficiently decent horror. Lord
Chancellor Campbell, in the reign of Victoria, flames up into quite
old-fashioned hearty Jacobitism, and ‘bites his thumb’ at his two
predecessors of the reigns of the first two Georges. In especial
reference to the ultra severe strictures of the Chancellor Hardwicke
in 1746, the Jacobite chancellor in the reign of Victoria says, in
Hardwicke’s ‘Life,’ ‘He forgot that although their attempt, not having
prospered, was called treason, and the law required that they should
be sentenced to death, they were not guilty of any moral offence,
and that if they had succeeded in placing Charles Edward on the
throne of his grandfather, they would have been celebrated for their
loyalty in all succeeding ages.’
And now, in the year 1877, we are gravely told that TIME’S
the claims of the brother, who supposes himself to be CHANGES.
a legitimate heir of the Stuarts (a supposition as idle
as the claim of the convict Orton to be a baronet is infamous), have
been fully investigated by a ‘delegation of Roman Catholic clergy,
nobility, and nobles of Scotland,’ who, it is added, with amusing
significance, pronounced those claims to be valid.’ We hear nothing,
however, of the names of the investigators, nor of the evidence on
which their judgment was founded. Awaiting the publication of both,
the investigation (if it ever took place) may be called a trait of the
very latest Jacobitism on record.[3]
After being a serious fact, Jacobitism became (with AT CHELSEA
the above exception) a sentiment which gradually AND
died out, or which was applied in quite an opposite BALMORAL.
sense to that in which it originated. When the French
revolution showed a taste for pulling down everything that was right
on end, the old London Jacobite toast, ‘May times mend, and down
with the bloody Brunswickers!’ ceased to be heard. Later, too, the
wearing of gilded oak-apples, on the 29th of May, ceased to be a
Jacobite emblem of love for the Stuart race of kings. It was taken as
a sign that the wearer was glad that a king at all was left to reign in
England. It is only as yesterday that in Preston unruly lads were
called ‘a parcel of young Jacobites,’—so strong and enduring was
the memory of the Jacobite presence there. Now, yearly at Chelsea,
the veteran soldiers are drawn up in presence of the statue of
Charles II., on the anniversary of his restoration. They perform an act
of homage by uncovering in that bronze presence (with its
permanent sardonic grin), and they add to it the incense of three
cheers in honour of that civil and religious king, and his ever-
welcome restoration. How different from the time of the first George,
when soldiers in the Guards were lashed to death, or near to it, in
the Park, for mounting an oak leaf on the 29th of May, or giving a
cheer over their cups for a prince of the line of Stuart. The
significance of words and things has undergone a happy change.
Donald Cameron, of Lochiel, is groom-in-waiting to the Queen; and,
on Her Majesty’s last birthday, at Balmoral, the singers saluted her
awaking with welcome Jacobite songs, and ended their vocalisation
with ‘Wha’ll be King but Charlie?’
[3] As this page is going through the press, we have the Comte
d’Albanie’s authority for stating that the above story (alluded to in
‘Notes and Queries,’ Oct. 6, p. 274) is ‘a pure invention,’ or ‘a
mystification.’
THE END.
Spottiswoode & Co., Printers, New-street Square and Parliament Street.

Transcriber’s Note:
This book was written in a period when many words had not
become standardized in their spelling. Words may have multiple
spelling variations or inconsistent hyphenation in the text. Jargon
and obsolete spellings have been left unchanged unless indicated
below.
Footnotes were renumbered sequentially and were moved to the
end of the chapter in which the corresponding anchor occurs. Page
headers were converted to sidenotes. Final stops missing at the end
of sentences and abbreviations were added. Duplicate words at line
endings were removed. Archibald Cameron’s brother, Donald, is
misidentified in the text as Duncan.
The following items were changed:
punnished to punished
Scotand to Scotland
Jabobite to Jacobite
orignal to original
Lous to Louis
It to In
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LONDON IN
THE JACOBITE TIMES, VOLUME II ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions

will be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright
in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and without
paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General
Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and
distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the
PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if
you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the
trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the
Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is
very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such
as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and
printed and given away—you may do practically ANYTHING in
the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright
law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially
commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the

free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this
work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase
“Project Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of
the Full Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or
online at www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and

Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand,
agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual
property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to
abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using
and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for
obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg™
electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms
of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only

be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by
people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.
There are a few things that you can do with most Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works even without complying with the
full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There
are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg™
electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and
help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the
collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the
individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the
United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright
law in the United States and you are located in the United
States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying,
distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works
based on the work as long as all references to Project
Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will
support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting free
access to electronic works by freely sharing Project
Gutenberg™ works in compliance with the terms of this
agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name
associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms
of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with
its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it
without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside
the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to
the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying,
displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works
based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The
Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright
status of any work in any country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project

Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must
appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project
Gutenberg™ work (any work on which the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed,
viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United

States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it
away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg
License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United
States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is

derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to
anyone in the United States without paying any fees or charges.
If you are redistributing or providing access to a work with the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of
paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use
of the work and the Project Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth
in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is

posted with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and
distribution must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through
1.E.7 and any additional terms imposed by the copyright holder.
Additional terms will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™
License for all works posted with the permission of the copyright
holder found at the beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project

Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files
containing a part of this work or any other work associated with
Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute
this electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1
with active links or immediate access to the full terms of the
Project Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form,
including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if
you provide access to or distribute copies of a Project
Gutenberg™ work in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or
other format used in the official version posted on the official
Project Gutenberg™ website (www.gutenberg.org), you must, at
no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy, a
means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other
form. Any alternate format must include the full Project
Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™
works unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or

providing access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the
method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The
fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty
payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on
which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your
periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked
as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information
about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who

notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that
s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and
discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of Project
Gutenberg™ works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in
the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90
days of receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project

Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different
terms than are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain
permission in writing from the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, the manager of the Project Gutenberg™
trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3
below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend

considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on,
transcribe and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright
law in creating the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite
these efforts, Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the
medium on which they may be stored, may contain “Defects,”
such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt
data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other
medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES -

Except for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in
paragraph 1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation, the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
and any other party distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic
work under this agreement, disclaim all liability to you for
damages, costs and expenses, including legal fees. YOU
AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE,
STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH
OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH
1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER
THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR
ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF
THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If

you discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you
paid for it by sending a written explanation to the person you
received the work from. If you received the work on a physical
medium, you must return the medium with your written
explanation. The person or entity that provided you with the
defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu
of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or
entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.
If the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund
in writing without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set

forth in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’,
WITH NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS
OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR
ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this
agreement violates the law of the state applicable to this
agreement, the agreement shall be interpreted to make the
maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by the applicable
state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any provision of
this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the

Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the
Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any
volunteers associated with the production, promotion and
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless
from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, that
arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project
Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or
deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect
you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of

Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new
computers. It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of
volunteers and donations from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the

assistance they need are critical to reaching Project
Gutenberg™’s goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™
collection will remain freely available for generations to come. In
2001, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was
created to provide a secure and permanent future for Project
Gutenberg™ and future generations. To learn more about the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and how your
efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and the
Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project

Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-
profit 501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the
laws of the state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by
the Internal Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal
tax identification number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation are tax
deductible to the full extent permitted by U.S. federal laws and
your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500

West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact
links and up to date contact information can be found at the
Foundation’s website and official page at
www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to

the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without
widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission
of increasing the number of public domain and licensed works
that can be freely distributed in machine-readable form
accessible by the widest array of equipment including outdated
equipment. Many small donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly
important to maintaining tax exempt status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws

regulating charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of
the United States. Compliance requirements are not uniform
and it takes a considerable effort, much paperwork and many
fees to meet and keep up with these requirements. We do not
solicit donations in locations where we have not received written
confirmation of compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or
determine the status of compliance for any particular state visit
www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states

where we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know
of no prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from
donors in such states who approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot

make any statements concerning tax treatment of donations
received from outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp
our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current

donation methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a
number of other ways including checks, online payments and
credit card donations. To donate, please visit:
www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project

Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could
be freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose
network of volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several

printed editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by
copyright in the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus,
we do not necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any
particular paper edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,

including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new
eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear
about new eBooks.

Science Under Siege Contesting The Secular Religion of Scientism 1St Edition Dick Houtman Editor All Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Science Under Siege Contesting The Secular Religion of Scientism 1St Edition Dick Houtman Editor All Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Science under Siege: Contesting the

Secular Religion of Scientism 1st

Science under Siege

More information about this series at

Science under Siege

Cover illustration: Baac3nes, Getty Images

the authority of science, more specifically about seven additional chapters

• Harambam, Jaron, and Stef Aupers. 2015. “Contesting Epistemic

We gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint revised versions of

Leuven, Belgium Dick Houtman

1 Introduction: A Cultural Sociology of the Authority

Part I Scientific Authority in the Face of Pluralism

Part II Cultural Worldviews and the Authority of

6 Cultural Worldviews and Lay Interpretations

Part III Contesting the Authority of Scientific

Peter Achterberg is Professor of Sociology at Tilburg University, The

Culture: Truth and Knowledge in an Era of Epistemic Instability is out

decline and religious change in Western Europe (1981–2008). He grad-

Table 4 Decomposition of the initial effect of education into direct

Introduction: A Cultural Sociology

Dick Houtman, Stef Aupers, and Rudi Laermans

An institution under attack must reexamine its foundations, restate its

1 Marching for Science

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

everywhere, our lawmakers especially, of the significance of science for

the political binaries of ‘right’ versus ‘left,’ ‘conservative’ versus ‘liberal,’

is superior to alternatives like religion, politics, or art (Part I of the book),

2 Scientism: Science as Secular Religion

2.2 Contesting the Authority of Science

In Weber’s hands the conduct of scientific research thus comes to

of bankruptcies and cases of unemployment. Neither is it hard to imagine

(1988) more general argument is that scientific research inevitably gener-

Thus, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002 [1944]), indeed a telling

claims because the latter are inextricably bound up with incommensu-

cultural difference, and it similarly invokes the utopian cultural imag-

taken-for-granted premises about the nature of reality and operates as a

The commonality of religion and science invokes a shared urge to

4 Secularization and the Authority

Luckmann 1967; Taylor 2007). Religious decline and religious privati-

would unlike religion end up in the privileged and authoritative position

while the decline in power of organized ethical religion appears to have

4.2 Part I: Scientific Authority in the Face of Pluralism

amenable to correction by sociological knowledge about how things

5 Cultural Worldviews and the Authority

Contemporary theories about ‘post-truth,’ i.e., truth claims accepted

5.2 Part II: Cultural Worldviews and the Authority of Scientific

scientific consensus of actually occurring climate change after all. This

6 Contestations of the Authority

6.2 Part III: Contesting the Authority of Scientific Institutions

7 Conclusion: Science Under Siege

Yet, as we have seen, lamentation, disapproval, and political protest

misplaced scientistic pretensions of science entailing a superior way of

‘1st. John Sobieski Stuart, Count d’Albanie,

Spottiswoode & Co., Printers, New-street Square and Parliament Street.

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

START: FULL LICENSE

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the

Section 1. General Terms of Use and

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United