We are emotional, spiritual creatures. We can’t divorce the reasoning side of our brain from the colorful and extreme part of our psyche.
It’s not such a bad thing. I wouldn’t want to be an AGI. Sure, I’d be smarter than everyone else, but I wouldn’t enjoy the sweet, smug sense of condescension that can only come from that distinct experience of being human.
I say all this because I’ve recently been thinking about the underpinnings of science. Science, on the face of it, seems like the only sure tool in the world to get us to truth. It is the de facto god of our age, and for good reason.
I still remember the childlike wonder I had holding an iPad for the first time. How do you just touch it and things move?! Where technology is going today makes that look like, literally, child’s play.
But the problem with ideologies, even technocratic ones, is that our trust in them can go too far. We put more weight on them than they can bear. Community becomes communism. Free markets become the ravenous beast of unfettered capitalism. And science becomes scientism.
What is scientism? To me, it’s this idea that everything we can really know as humans can only be discovered through the scientific method. Science is the only final arbiter of truth, basically. If something cannot be deduced by mathematics or tested and verified by repeated experimentation, then, for all intents and purposes, it doesn’t exist.
In fact, as I see it, scientism goes further than that. It claims that every phenomenon – everything that happens in the universe – has, at its foundation, a merely mechanistic, materialistic explanation. There is no “supernatural” or “spiritual.” Therefore, God is a delusion or an evolutionarily advantageous lie at best.
Again, on the face of it, this feels right. The fruits of science are obvious: rockets, AI, medical breakthroughs that I thank God for. The fruits of religion are more ambiguous and spotty.
But let’s screw our feelings for a moment here and ask the question of whether scientism, as a philosophy or ideology, holds up to scrutiny.
Let’s assume that, indeed, all we can trust is what can be scientifically proven. Can scientism itself be proven scientifically? In other words, if scientism is true and everything we can know to be true can only be that which is scientifically verified and everything else should be held as untrue or not worth believing in, then the idea of scientism itself must be an idea that is scientifically verifiable. Otherwise, it is not worthy of belief.
But it isn’t scientifically verifiable. How can anyone prove with a series of repeatable experiments or airtight mathematical equations that everything we know can only be known through science? That there are no truths we can possibly intuit from our own subjective experiences?
Heck, what about what we learn from history? After all, I can’t run an experiment in a lab on the Boston Tea Party. Most of history – even the history that matters most to us – is beyond hard scientific inquiry.
This isn’t to say that science is useless or meaningless, though. This isn’t even to say that we can’t ultimately access a kind of truth from science. Of course, we can. We do every day. We know this because we see the fruits of our scientific labor. But that’s a far cry from saying that only science can lead us to truth. That claim is indefensible.
But to believe that science, in general, can discover truth about the world is helpful. It may be just that: a belief. It’s something we can never prove definitively. But if we start with the assumption that most things that happen in the universe have a materialistic explanation, that can and is a useful, workable assumption.
In this respect, the pursuit of science is not as far from religion as it appears to be at first. Why?
I make the assumption that Christianity is true. And with that assumption, I am able to make sense of a lot of things I see in the world. It unlocks for me the reason why we live in such a fine-tuned universe. It explains why humanity for most of its history has taken for granted the idea of divinity and spirituality. It explains our moral compasses. It makes sense of the multitude of miracles, the prime one being the resurrection of Christ himself. It grounds ultimate meaning in life – meaning that I intuit from my own experience really does exist but that science cannot prove.
I cannot prove that primary assumption that Christianity is true definitively any more than a scientist can prove definitively that all things have a materialistic explanation. But our assumptions work. The mental framework through which we seek to understand the world makes sense of it.
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Catholic Anonymous 
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