The Religion of Scientism, Part 3: A Faith in Peril

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It really is too bad the name Scientology is already taken. One way of translating the term would be “Science Belief” or “Science Opinion.” It would perfectly describe the type of mythological science fiction many of our loudest scientists are participating in.  Nonetheless, the term Scientism works just the same.  

We are past due for a working definition of Scientism. Scientism must first be shown rather than defined. It must be proven, since most people who are adherents to it reject its existence. Having done that in the previous articles, it is time to describe the movement.  

So, then, what is Scientism? Many scientists have posited that the only questions worth asking and answering are scientific ones. This matrix of views encompasses things like empiricism and evidentialism. Scientism is the implicit, though sometimes outwardly rejected, belief that all questions that used to be answered by appealing to religion or philosophy can now only be answered by science. Science is the only place to uncover the objective truth about the physical world and beyond. The and beyond is where the empiricism and evidentialism of some scientists becomes the full-blown religion of Scientism. Interestingly, as alluded to above, sometimes the notion that this view offers an ethic or a metaphysic is rejected, seemingly unaware that that is precisely what is being presented.  

Scientism states that only science can provide us with answers to the origins of the universe and existence of life, morality, meaning and purpose, and what happens to us when we die. The answer to some of these may seem like non-answers: there is no morality or nothing happens to us when we die.i But do not be deceived. Those answers are metaphysical in that they require knowledge that transcends the physical world that science is technically limited to. To believe science says anything about them is to demand a science that transcends physical bounds, and is therefore metaphysical.   

A Rival Religion

Some bristle at the idea that science has become a quasi-religion, or that it even needs religion, or that religion has a monopoly on the notions of beauty and goodness that scientists are now leaning into. Italian particle physicist Guido Tonelli, known widely for his role in discovering the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider, writes

And yet, despite the notion that we have progressively lost something of the magic and mystery that had accompanied us for millennia, the vision of the world that we have gradually developed through science is actually more amazing than anything we could have imagined before. It retells the story of our origins more imaginatively and powerfully than any mythological narrative. 

Three things should be noted.  

First, as this series of articles have shown, a fair amount of what passes as the scientific narrative of reality is a myth, complete with metaphysical origin stories and anthropologies. It is a religious and philosophical rendering of some scientific observations greatly extrapolated. 

Second, scientific theories and mythological stories may both be speaking truths, just in different ways. Both can be fascinating. Both can also be true (and mythological does not automatically mean “untrue”). One describes how something happened, the other why something happened. As Oxford mathemetician John Lennox has often said, there are two reasons one might give for why water boils: because heat excites the molecules, and because he wants a cup of tea. Is the scientific story more “amazing” than all the others? This is the claim that only an apologist of science would make, for he cannot let science be less than the best in any walk of life—which again points to the religious (and not so confident) component of Scientism. And without invoking a mythological story component to Scientism, the story doesn’t seem to be more interesting, because there would be no story, just one long chain of events creating an increasingly complex though meaningless, purposeless, and valueless web of cause and effect. 

Third, if Dr. Tonelli wanted to prove how much more interesting and “imaginative” the scientific story was, perhaps a different framing device would have helped. His book is entitled Genesis: The Story of How Everything Began. His chapters are entitled things like “In the Beginning Was the Void,” “Day One: An Irresistible Breath Produces the First Wonder,” “Day Two: The Delicate Touch of a Boson Changes Everything, Forever,” and on and on until describing the history of the universe in a 7-day framework. Where have I read that before? One wonders why the scientific story needs held up by a framework from an allegedly underwhelming “myth.” 

The Faith of a Scientist

“Faith-based beliefs are inescapable in science,” theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser explains. A century and a half ago, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche recognized the same thing in his Genealogy of Morals, writing, 

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as science “without any presuppositions” … a philosophy, a “faith,” must always be there first of all, so that science can acquire from it a direction, a meaning, a limit, a method, a right to exist.  

Here is Nietzsche again in The Gay Science  

It is still a metaphysical faith that underlies our faith in science—and we men of knowledge of today, we godless men and anti-metaphysicians, we, too, still derive our flame from the fire ignited by a faith millennia old, the Christian faith, which was also Plato’s, that God is truth, that truth is divine

Philosophers, both ancient and modern, and including our modern scientists, Nietzsche observes, “are all oblivious of how much the will to truth itself first requires justification.” Why should we believe that truth, so divinized in our past, is “the highest court of appeal”? Perhaps a question for another day, but Nietzsche prophetically looks forward to our own time and sees that when faith in God is denied, “a new problem arises: that of the value of truth.”  

The late NASA astronomer and planetary physicist Robert Jastrow explicitly drew out in his book God and the Astronomers what precisely this Scientistic faith entails. The religion of a scientist is one that “believes there is order and harmony in the Universe. Every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event.” Indeed, it was the idea of the reliability of their God that led medieval Christians to revolutionize the scientific enterprise and begin to consider that nature, created by a reliable Lawmaker, must be made of laws that govern events that are reliable, repeatable and, therefore, able to be studied, tested, and by the grace of God, understood.  

This is rightly termed a faith since it came precisely out of faith, that is, Christian metaphysics about the nature of God. As historian of science James Hannam accurately summarized it in God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (Icon, 2009), “The motivations and justifications of medieval natural philosophers were carried over almost unchanged by the pioneers of modern science.” That nature is reliable and coherent is by no means an obvious conclusion when one looks at the natural world, though it feels like that today in the aftermath of our Christian metaphysical, and consequent scientific, heritage. The idea of the nature of the material world is founded upon Christian metaphysical and theological thought, and even more directly, medieval Christian speculation about the nature of God.  

For the scientists with a Scientism faith, they should know their faith is due to another, older one. Obviously, their faith has taken a different path. Yet, this path is growing ever more difficult to traverse, for just as soon as succor is found in this faith, Jastrow continues, it is 

violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized.   

And then, the death knell. Jastrow concludes,  

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. 

It is time these scientists heeded the words of Jesus in Revelation 2:4: “You have abandoned your first love.” The truth is not divine. Rather, the Divine is Truth.  

An Inconvenient Truth

“Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth,” wrote English physicist and best-selling author Paul Davies. “The universe looks suspiciously like a fix.” The evidence has mounted and, after a while, when the number of helpful and necessary “coincidences” add up, we are left with the conclusion of Fred Hoyle, who suggested that “a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics.”  

Jim Baggott has said that “physicists get a little twitchy when confronted with too many coincidences.” But Christians have another word for it: restlessness. It is the word Augustine used nearly 1,600 years ago when he wrote, “Our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee.” And so, it appears, are our minds and theories.   

“We are faced with a real question that we cannot resist asking,” writes British theoretical physicist David Lindley. “How did our universe, in the form we perceive, come to be?” It is impossible not to ask this question, but the sad reality facing every scientist is that “science cannot answer it.” Lindley states that there is no “satisfying conclusion” to this question. But to admit that our universe might be one of a kind, “uniquely suited to our existence” would have “unwelcome theological implications.”  

Yet Howard Smith, surveying the only available evidence, is led to conclude that 

If the human race—as far as we are likely to know for millennia—is singular, then we must consider the possibility that neither our planet nor ourselves are products of common happenstance.  

We live in a time after the so-called “Scientific Revolution,” whose only truly unique contribution to the world, if you want to call it that, is that we now see the world scientifically, mechanically. We view others, in many ways, scientifically, which is to say, biologically, chemically, mechanically, malleably. Certainly not spiritually. It is a hollow worldview where the lack of purpose will lead to an obsession with power, pleasure, and storing up treasures.  

This worldview—Scientism being science minus Christianity’s teleology—is not neutral. It is the true misanthropic principle, and it has consequences. The mutually informing and strengthening coalescence of the misanthropic Copernican Principle with the “from nothing” universe and Darwinian evolutionary thought—which have together left an overall nihilistic and fatalistic mindset of purposeless, meaningless, and valueless existence—has been a disaster in science and has created a dark history in the world at large. Indeed, as Dostoevsky’s Ivan and Dmitri Karamazov considered, and later atheist existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre admitted, without God everything is permitted. How do we fix it? Philip Sherrard is here again with the harried though hopeful answer:  

[M]odern science has its origin in a loss of memory, a forgetfulness by man of who he is. By an ineluctable logic inherent in this origin it proceeds along a course each step of which is marked by a further fall by man into deeper ignorance of his own nature and consequently into deeper ignorance of the nature of everything else. Progressively divorced by this ignorance from the roots of his being, man, so long as he persists in this course, is doomed to advance blindly at an ever-increasing pace towards total loss of identity, total loss of control, and eventually to total self-destruction. Nothing can stop this process except a complete reversal of direction. And nothing can initiate a reversal of direction except a recovery by man of an awareness of who he is: the cure must go back to where the sickness started. 

Sherrard seems to echo the sentiment above: Science abandoned its first love and must return to it to be saved.   

The Heart of the Matter

Decades ago, French social scientist and philosopher Jacques Ellul, among others, warned us that technology is not neutral. In the ever-prophetic cultural critic Neil Postman’s words from 1992, “technology became a particularly dangerous enemy.” It is overall, however, “both friend and enemy.” Nuclear technology can provide cheap, safe, renewable energy that could solve our looming energy crisis; it can also obliterate tens of thousands of people and whole cities and ecosystems at a time.  

When a certain deified view of technology (called “technopoly” by Postman) is mixed with Scientism (which is a deified view of science), this dangerous cocktail is served. Technology is merely the application of science to human life. If our science is at root misanthropic, then so will be—in perhaps a hidden, circuitous fashion—our technology. One need only look at the impact of social media as exposed by Max Fisher, Abigail Shrier, and Jonathan Haidt to receive the rude awakening.    

But all is not lost. I see a world that believes they’re rid of the need for God and yet, in often surprising ways, they betray their quest to find him, though they do not yet know he is who they’re looking for. With every misstep, every misuse of technology that is proven to be caused by a rottenness in its core, we see the need for God to protect us from ourselves. This is not to argue that when we all believed in objective human dignity and in God’s law that we all listened to the better angels of our nature. But to echo the concerns of those non-Christian philosophers like Nietzsche and Voltaire, what shall be the result when we reject God all together? For our inhumanity is us with the remnants of a moral law still upon us; what shall come of us with this vestige finally falls?  

We must return to our first love. Again and again.  

Read More

The Religion of Scientism, Part 1: Creation Myths  

The Religion of Scientism, Part 2: Anthropology Myths 

Can Morality Exist Without God? 

Is Morality Based on Evolutionary Ethics? 

Tags :
faith,religion,science,scientism
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