Scientism and the allure of control
“Are you convinced now?” asks the Sphere of the Circle. “I am an infinite number of Circles… one placed on top of the other. When I cut through your plane, I make in your plane a section which you, very rightly, call a Circle” Imagine, he instructs, a 2-dimensional shape, moving “parallel to itself upward to comprise a solid.”
“You mean northward,” responds the Circle. For he cannot comprehend such a direction as “upward,” and proceeds to abuse the Sphere, “Madman! Irregular!”
~ E. A. Abbott
Away from our workplaces, and especially in churches, we scientists often find ourselves alone.
Yet an ideology now commonly called “scientism” has “a popular hold on the imagination,” according to Alister McGrath. On the popular level, much of the trouble began with the New Atheists, who wielded science into an “ism” after wrenching it from the death throes of positivism. These authors convinced many to buy into their claim that science is the only rational way of understanding reality. Away from popular non-fiction, fictional characters tout seemingly wise lines, like from Dana Scully: “what I find fantastic is any notion that there are answers beyond the realm of science.”
The circularity of this view has been pointed out by many, even secular, philosophers and scientists. The only way to verify (and science is enamoured with verification) the claim that science is the only rational way of investigating reality is to somehow get ‘outside’ of science and obtain an overarching vantage point from where we can assess the relative rationality of science. But, as writes philosopher Edward Feser, “the very existence of that extra-scientific vantage point would falsify the claim that science alone gives us a rational means of investigating objective reality.”
Science, I learnt the hard way when it left me flailing in quantum uncertainty, is fundamentally empirical: it observes nature. It cannot, in the words of the great scientific essayist Stephen Jay Gould, “adjudicate” on what might lie beyond what we observe. Nor can it, writes McGrath, determine “what the world ought to be like.” That quantum uncertainty exists or that objects fall under gravity in a predictable fashion is something we have learnt from observation, not by knowing beforehand that it must or will always be so. Epistemology cannot determine ontology, as McGrath succinctly argues.
Yet scientism, like most plain language terms, is a slippery beast. A. C. Grayling, who is philosophically trained and might be thought of as a second wave New Atheist, claims to distinguish his views from scientism in the first few pages of his book The Frontiers of Knowledge. But two pages later he asserts that the question of whether there might be limits to our knowledge is “meaningless” because it is unanswerable, thus aligning himself with the positivists and scientismists and distancing himself from historical atheists.
Even Bertrand Russell acknowledged unanswerable questions were worth asking. Grayling’s contention that we are in a “primitive stage” of science whose “frontier—so different from a boundary” may be one day crossed with the knowledge borne of our “best and most rigorously supported belief” clearly privileges science as the pre-eminent way of knowing and fits atheist philosopher Massimo Pigliucci’s definition of scientism as a “totalizing attitude that regards science as the ultimate standard and arbiter of all interesting questions.”
When weighing the truth claims of science vs religion, especially Christianity, I find the perplexing question is not why there are philosophical debates about the nature of knowledge and reality. It’s not even why the rise of naturalistic science cut a line between itself and the natural philosophy and Christian theology it had co-existed with for centuries. Of course there was going to be conflict where its findings and that of long held theological beliefs overlapped.
The real conundrum is why science was eventually recognized by many as the ultimate arbiter of rational knowledge and became entrenched as such in the popular imagination. This has persisted beyond first-wave New Atheism in the works of current best-selling authors like Grayling and Yuval Noah Harari.
This can’t just be a reaction against a poorly lived out Christianity that I suspect fuels at least some New Atheist positions, nor can it be boiled down to purely ethical objections (like the problem of evil) or traditional philosophical arguments that old-school atheists relied on. There is also something drastic going on with the perception of science, even amongst many scientists.
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Read the rest at Mere Orthodoxy