Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
How scientism hinders the pursuit of truth and meaning
How scientism hinders the pursuit of truth and meaning
Apr 2, 2025 7:55 PM

Empirical inquiry can provide evidence of existence, but it is greatly limited in its ability to explore meaning and purpose.

Read More…

Scientism, or the belief that all truth must be empirically verifiable, is growing in society. Given the philosophical and practical flaws inherent to this ideology, it is important to understand how it manifests in modern life.

Adherents to scientism in the modern world can be classified into two categories: zealots and agnostics. The zealots are the apostles of scientism, loudly proclaiming the gospel truth of its tenets. The agnostics are the members of the flock, occasionally allowing their beliefs to trickle into but not centering their lives around their faith in science.

The zealots are those who believe fully in and structure their worldview around the assertion that all knowledge is empirically verifiable. These zealots have operated as the vanguard for promoting scientism, spreading the ideology throughout Western society over the past few centuries. They present themselves as rebels, “free thinkers” fighting the long, pernicious traditions of religious faith that they feel are embedded within most societal institutions and human minds.

Richard Dawkins is a primary example. Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, is an outspoken atheist and frequently criticizes religious faith as irrational. He has two main problems with religion: it leads to conflict, and it is a justification for belief without evidence. In a speech to the American Humanist Association, Dawkins argued that “faith is one of the world’s great parable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” This attitude, that religion is unjustified because it is not empirically supported, is the textbook definition of scientism. What Dawkins misses is that there are sound and important, non-empirical arguments for religious faith and against scientism.

Scientism’s agnostic adherents are, by definition, less outspoken, and overt than the zealots. Rather than presenting such thinking as a direct alternative to religious faith, they primarily exhibit their scientism in the “slavish imitation of the method and Language of Science,” as F.A. Hayek once described it. Agnostic scientism does not necessarily proclaim scientific observation as the only method of obtaining truth. But it does believe it to be the best.

To the agnostic, some beliefs may be justifiable by other means for the moment, but eventually and ultimately all things should be explainable to human cognition through scientific means. Many of the most prominent scientists and leaders of the present today can be classified under this category, including Anthony Fauci, who considers himself a spiritual humanist.

An even more emblematic example is offered in one of the fathers of modern positive economics, Milton Friedman, who wrote:

I do not believe God has anything to do with economics. But values do…I do not know where my e from, but that does not mean (a) I don’t have them, (b) I don’t hold them as strongly as you hold your belief in God. (c) They turn out — not accidentally, I believe — to be very much like these held by most other people whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, agnostic, or abstract. (d) Which leads me to believe that they are a product of the same evolutionary process that accounts for the rest of our customs as well as physical characterizations.

Friedman’s scientism, while plainly stated, is much more subtle than Dawkins’. He understands the influence of human development on human knowledge, yet he still grounds the meaning afforded by social and ethical values in their survival against those peting societies. He derives their value from a type of deterministic evolutionary process that he believes can be understood and specified, if given enough scientific study. But an outside observer can’t know the motivations of the individual human minds that make up these societies. Since social scientists cannot fully unify the patterns and trends of society with the movement of individual minds, it would be a mistake to conflate these theories with universally applicable scientific theorems. Indeed, both forms of scientism are incorrect due to basic philosophical flaws.

Scientism contains a self-refuting premise. If scientism is the belief that all knowledge is empirically verifiable, then scientism is self-refuting on its face. There are no studies, tests, or experiments that can prove the logical claim that all knowledge must be grounded in empirical observation. The zealous scientism, that definitively denies the existence of religion or of knowledge outside of the natural sciences, is false because of this self-refuting premise. Thus, it is easy to pinpoint the error that the advocates of this ideology make.

The agnostic version makes a more subtle philosophical mistake. Agnostics argue that it is currently impossible to know if religion is true, because of a lack of empirical evidence. Yet it is possible to know philosophical and moral truth even without empirical evidence. For example, society proscribes murder and theft not because of any empirical evidence or study, but because it recognizes that these actions are morally wrong. Society correctly sees that humans, just by their nature, possess a right to life and property, and therefore it has made laws to protect these rights. The fact that these are moral and not empirical claims does not matter; they are still true.

Therefore, both the zealous and agnostic varieties of scientism are flawed in their belief in the primacy of scientific knowledge.

Scientific study is only one method of supporting claims of truth. Empirical inquiry can provide evidence of existence, but it is limited in its ability to explore meaning and purpose. Good scientists know that the science is never settled and the search for truth never ends. To dismiss the tools of human reason outside of scientific study, through either agnostic or zealous scientism, hinders the pursuit of knowledge and meaning and therefore prevents the realization of a free and virtuous society.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Why the Poor Should Be Able to Scalp Their Tickets to See Pope Francis
Last week, 80,000 residents of New York got a free gift: a ticket to see Pope Francis’s procession through Central Park on September 25. Not surprisingly, soon after the tickets started showing up for sale on websites like eBay and Craigslist for hundreds and even thousands of dollars. Also not a surprise is the disgusted reaction some people had to news abouttheticket scalping: “Tickets for events with Pope Francis are distributed free for a reason — to enable as many...
Let’s Listen for ‘Cry of the Poor’ before the ‘Cry of the Earth’
When governments have followed the sort of environmental and free-market admonitions Pope Francis gave us in Laudato Si, negative results often follow. This struck your writer this past week as he read a piece reporting the unforeseen consequences of one specific wrongheaded environmental effort. In his encyclical, Pope Francis writes: Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological approach always es a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to...
Entrepreneurship and Interdisciplinary Scholarship
Israel M. Kirzner While reading economist (and rabbi) Israel M. Kirzner’s Competition & Entrepreneurship (1973), it occurred to me that his description of what the “pure entrepreneur” does could also be applied to what a good interdisciplinary scholar, such as someone who studies faith and economics, does (or at least aspires to do). In our world of imperfect knowledge, Kirzner writes, there are likely to exist, at any given time, a multitude of opportunities that have not yet been taken...
Is Free Market Capitalism Moral?
Is free market capitalism moral or immoral? If it’s based on greed and selfishness, should it be rejected for an alternative economic system? And if capitalism is moral, what makes it so? Walter Williams, a economist at George Mason University, answers these questions and explains why the free market is morally superior to any other approaches to organizing economic behavior. ...
5 Facts About the U.S. Constitution
Constitution Day is celebrated in America every year on September 17, the anniversary of the day the framers signed the document. Here are five facts you should know about the U.S. Constitution. 1. The Constitution contains 4,543 words, including the signatures and has four sheets, 28-3/4 inches by 23-5/8 inches each. It contains 7,591 words including the 27 amendments. It is the oldest and shortest written Constitution of any major government in the world. 2. Thomas Jefferson did not sign...
Video: Jonathan Witt On Tolkien’s Vision Of Freedom
As we prepare to kick off the fall portion of the 2015 Acton Lecture Series tomorrow (featuring Don Devine speaking about how America can find its way back to a harmony between freedom and tradition), we take a look back at thefinal lecture of the spring series, which was delivered on May 21 by Jonathan Witt, who aside from being aformer English professor, a Research and Media Fellow at the Acton Institute, and Managing Editor of The Stream, is also...
The Bright Side of Sharia Law
Why aren’t church leaders who are so quick to condemn capitalism, asks Rev. Jerry J. Pokorsky in this week’s Acton Commentary, decrying Big Government bureaucracy? The warnings of recent papal teachings on questions of social justice rarely – if ever – identify the dangers of a highly bureaucratized central government. Apparently most of the sinful and corrosive “love for es from private sector capitalists, not government public sector agencies. Certainly corporate capitalistic greed can and does have serious economic consequences....
The New Socialists and the Social Ownership of Money
After getting home from work you get a statement in the mail from the local government saying you owe $20,000 for college tuition. You’re surprised to receive the billsince (a) you never went to college yourself and (b) your own children are still in preschool. Upon reading the fine print you discover the expected payment is not to cover any costs you’ve incurred but to pay for the tuition of college students in your neighborhood. Outraged, you turn to your...
The Jewish roots of freedom
Morning Panel at “Judaism, Christianity, & the West.” On September 9, leading scholars of the world came together to discuss the ways in which Judaism and Christianity have contributed to building the foundations of liberty. “Judaism, Christianity, and the West: Building and preserving the institutions of freedom” was the fourth conference in the “One and indivisible? The relationship between religious and economic freedom” conference series. Sponsored by the Acton Institute and the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, this day-long event...
Admiring Pope Francis Doesn’t Prohibit Disagreement
Anyone not touched by Pope Francis’ appearance on ABC television earlier this month may want to have their pulse checked for signs of a heart. Quite frankly, he knocked it out of the park in this writer’s humble opinion. Whether speaking to the plight of immigrant children, obviously enjoying a young girl’s vocal rendition of a hymn, or offering encouragement to a single mother of two, Francis was in his element. As I marveled at the Pope on primetime, national...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved