Science Attacked by Mother Nature of the Spiritual Left

“Think only the religious right is anti-science?  How about the spiritual left?” asks Lee M. Silver in The Scientist.  His article details the holistic thinking invading much of popular culture and university student minds, that pictures nature as a benevolent super-organism (with usually feminine characteristics).
    The article is an excerpt from his book CHALLENGING NATURE: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life (Harper Collins, 2006).  Silver (molecular biologist, Princeton) points out cases where “Mother Nature” can be downright nasty.  He finds it surprising that “even in America, where traditional Christianity is still a powerful force, highly educated young people are attracted to the post-Christian worldview of a unified ‘Mother Nature’ that is more than a metaphor.”
    One reviewer of the book said, “The threat to science from what Silver calls the spiritual left may already have overtaken the threat from the religious right.  Now it’s time to apply our collective energy to counter the rise in mysticism and fall of skeptical inquiry.”

Metaphors can be misleading (07/04/2003), but so can excesses of rationalism and skepticism.  Silvers is described as a rationalist.  The term requires clarification; is he a rationalist like Descartes, as opposed to an empiricist like Locke?  To what extent does he trust reasoning out of his own mind, and to what extent his sense experience?  The history of science, and its underlying philosophy of knowledge, is replete with rich debates about how much we know and can know.  Many of these same debates are with us today.
    It would be very simplistic for Silver to Hi-Ho about the rationalist’s ability to describe the world in ways that are value-free or neutral, or to know anything in science that is universal and certain.  Silver cannot avoid engaging in his own metaphors to attack those of his target; he calls Mother Nature “nasty” and pictures organic life as a laissez-faire democracy.  It wouldn’t take too deep an analysis to reveal that, while Silver criticizes both left and right (a metaphor), there are some deep questions he needs to ask himself.  Assume, for instance, he is a materialist.  If his brain is composed solely of atoms, how can he know his brain is composed of atoms?
    Nevertheless, it’s good to hear a scientist point out the fallacies in leftist mysticism instead of making the “Religious Right” the perennial bogeyman.  (Note: there’s another metaphor right there.)  OK, now can we talk scientific evidence?*