Mike Oren.com

This Discover piece reminded me of the other part missing from the debate about Sociology's standpoint as a science or not, as (it seems to me) that many people have a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is or claims to be. To be fair, part of the blame for this misunderstanding must be placed on the shoulders of introductory science courses (pre-college) science where (too often) the rhetoric tends to suggest something as an absolute, universal fact when, in fact, science only claims that "this is what is known at this time, given this evidence". Science is always reinventing itself, and I (personally) know of nobody in any of the sciences (biology, physics, etc.) who claim that something is absolutely true now and forever. There are very few actual laws in the sciences (although there are many theories that are 'accepted' as true, but they are not established as truth). But this could become a long ranting blog post in itself, so without further ranting, I'll end this discussion at that and this choice quote:

"First off, there is no such thing as scientism. What he is describing is simply science, because science by its very nature is an attempt to explain all things using natural processes. And he seems to think science has no imagination.

That’s insane. Without imagination, all we can do is categorize the world. Assigning names and numbers, statistics and categories. And while that sort of thing is important in the scientific process, it’s not science itself. Without imagination, science is a dictionary."

On a side note (and to rile some feathers that I probably shouldn't be), try reading the article replacing 'religion'/'supernatural' with [de]constructionism (that's how I have started reading some [de]construction texts anyway, only in reverse--sadly, that is not a joke, I have fallen into that habit, although I admit it is a bad one as it makes me too dismissive and it's not my intention to just dismiss anything off-hand).