The BioLogos Forum: Ian Hutchinson

Ian H. Hutchinson is professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His primary research interest is plasma physics and its practical applications. He and his MIT team designed, built and operate the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, an international experimental facility whose magnetically confined plasmas are prototypical of a future fusion reactor. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Cambridge University and his doctorate in engineering physics from the Australian National University. He directed the Alcator project from 1987 to 2003 and served as head of MIT’s nuclear science and engineering department from 2003 to 2009. In addition to over 160 journal articles on a variety of plasma phenomena, Hutchinson is widely known for his standard monograph on measuring plasmas: Principles of Plasma Diagnostics. He has also served on numerous editorial boards and national fusion review panels. For more, see Hutchinson's upcoming book Monopolizing Knowledge.

Series by Hutchinson

Hutchinson on Atheism (1 Parts)

In this five part series, Ian Hutchinson seeks to draw a sharp line between science and scientism. Scientism holds that all truth emerges from scientific study and explanation. Hutchinson, however, disagrees as he points to science’s inability to establish truth about, for example, the events that have occurred in humanity’s history on earth. He specifically engages Richard Dawkins assertions (as put forth in his book The God Delusion) that God is a scientific hypothesis that has been essentially disproved by science and that evolution explains religion as nothing more than a natural phenomenon, offering excellent critiques of both arguments.

Monopolizing Knowledge (6 Parts)

Ian Hutchinson’s series centers on his new book Monopolizing Knowledge in which he critiques the world-view he calls “scientism”: “the belief that science, modeled on the natural sciences, is the only source of real knowledge.” In Hutchinson’s eyes, this erroneous world-view is at least indirectly responsible for the apparent friction between science and religion that many see today. Hutchinson will attempt to both explain and dismantle “scientism” by examining both what we mean when we say “science”, and how the “scientistic” worldview oversteps this definition and becomes a philosophical and metaphysical framework.

Posts by Hutchinson

Monopolizing Knowledge, Part 1

September 12, 2011

Science is increasingly portrayed as identical to a philosophical doctrine that I call "scientism". Scientism is the belief that all valid knowledge is science. Scientism says, or at least implicitly assumes, that rational knowledge is scientific, and everything else that claims the status of knowledge is just superstition, irrationality, emotion, or nonsense.
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Essays by Hutchinson