You put the case very well and I don’t want to seem stubborn by persevering, since you’re convincing me up to a point. That said, I do think the only way to not capitulate to science’s encroachment is to willfully draw an arbitrary line and refuse to accept anything that crosses over it, which may be very hard to sustain. You say science can’t explain the experience of music – but it will. That’s exactly what it will do. It will define in terms of absolute precision why the subjective emotional wonders of music occur – and once science has nailed that down, to say there’s more to it will be like saying, “oh, but there’s something indefinably more to the taste of ice cream than simply triggering taste-bud responses and pleasure centers in the brain, something magical outside of mere biology.” Music is a device that pushes our buttons and makes us go back for more. Nothing else but science can actually explain the experience of it; outside of that, it will just be babble.
So, I think there’s a huge problem for humanism as science tidies up what’s happening. Just as, at one point, supposed mystical experiences turned out to be explicable as epilepsy or schizophrenia, so the raptures that humanism attributes to other experiences might be revealed as equally misunderstood. I admit it’s only a “might.” But it’s quite a plausible “might.” And then what can we say? But I really did see God when I had that fit, so it makes no difference what the doctor says, right? And if I’ve never heard from God since I started taking the pills, well, that’s just a coincidence. It’s true that following this line of thought leads to absolute meaninglessness, but sadly that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. I defer to Al Gore for a useful description: an inconvenient truth.
I should add, I think there’s probably not an answer to Sciborg’s point, that it’s difficult to see how you’d live like that in practice. Brassier holds views about Israel’s “crimes”, Bakker at least used to say he believed in feminism, and so on. So there’s a hypocrisy, and the nihilist (or pseudo-nihilist) can only shrug about it, leaving the rest of us free to pursue our own interests after all. The problem is that that pursuit might be taking place, possibly, in an ever shrinking context unless science hits on something that opens the box back up again (but we shouldn’t count on that).