Scientism, Evolution, and the Meaning of Life
19th November 2011
Scientism is “the uncritical application of scientific or quasi-scientific methods to inappropriate fields of study or investigation.” When scientists proclaim truths outside the realm of their expertise, they are guilty of practicing scientism. Two notable scientistic scientists, of whom I have written several times (e.g., here and here), are Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer. It is unsurprising that Dawkins and Singer are practitioners of scientism. Both are strident atheists, and a strident atheists, as I have said, “merely practice a ‘religion’ of their own. They have neither logic nor science nor evidence on their side — and eons of belief against them.”
I would have to disagree with the last sentence. The problem is epistemology — how do we know what we know? Atheists, especially ‘scientistic’ atheists, take the position that the modern scientific methodology of observation, measurement, and extrapolation from observation and measurement, is sufficient to detect anything that Really Exists — and that the burden of proof is on those who propose that something Really Exists that cannot be reliably observed and measured; which is of course impossible within that mental framework. They have plenty of logic and science on their side, and their ‘evidence’ is the commonly-accepted maxim that it is impossible to prove a negative.
Religious people, of course, rarely try to tackle scientists on their own ground, perhaps feeling (naturally enough) that the ground is grossly slanted against their position. I think that a large part of it is the pervasive ‘scientism’ that underlies the modern world — science has given us all these wonderful toys, so it must be the way to go, right? — so religious people just refuse to enter the ring, so to speak, since they know how it comes out and aren’t going to wast their time in an effort doomed to failure.
This strikes me as a mistake. The medieval scholastics certainly had no hesitation using the tools of science (to the extent that they had any) to develop their religious viewpoints; Thomas Aquinas is the obvious poster child here, but this sort of thing was the chief intellectual product of the university system for upwards of 400 years.
Their approach was fairly straightforward and ‘scientific’: Certain things happened in times past that are outside the observable, measurable operation of the natural world, and for which we have multiple eyewitness accounts; we go with the traditional explanation until somebody comes up with an alternative the fits the facts (as they saw them) better. If you see a guy in a red and blue suit faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound — a lot of people will, absent any other explanation of how he can do that, take him at face value as Superman. Similarly, if a Jewish carpenter of no known special talents works a bunch of miracles and, when tortured to death by the government, comes back to life, there are people who are willing to take His word for it that he can do all this because He’s the Son of God, since they can’t come up with a ‘scientific’ explanation. As Sherlock Holmes was fond of saying, if you’ve eliminated the impossible, what’s left, however improbable, is likely to be the truth.
The distinguishing characteristic of ‘scientistic’ atheists, of course, is that they start from the a priori assumption that non-natural explanations of such phenomena are on the realm of the impossible rather than the realm of the improbable, thereby constricting (plainly tendentiously) the circle of ‘acceptable proof’ to exclude their religious opponents on the definitional level. When you define your opponents’ position as incorrect, then you win by default every time; and there’s a lot of justice in said opponents’ cry of ‘Hey! That’s not fair!’ But the ‘fairness’ of that approach is something that the religious and the irreligious will never agree on, so we’re stuck with permanently incompatible viewpoints.