Scientism
From Neoredemptive
A worldview holding that science and the scientific method holds primacy in all fields of knowledge and intellectual inquiry. We refer to those who hold this worldview as "scienceists" (as opposed to "scientists", who are simply practitioners of the scientific methodology). Saganism is a well-known breed of scientism, and it continues to have a widely-heard voice in the world today through writers such as Richard Dawkins.
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Structure of Scientistic Inquiry
The scientific method and worldview as popularized by Sagan and Dawkins, restricts and structures all inquiry and knowledge around a small set of cardinal virtues:
- Observability -- Nothing can be said about that which cannot be observed.
- Repeatability -- Nothing can be said about phenomena which do not recur under identical causation.
- Objectivity -- Nothing can be said about phenomena which can be observed, verified, or falsified by some people but not by others.
- Rationality -- All valid theories and conclusions must adhere to the rules of rationality.
- Simplicity -- All other things being equal, preference should be given to simple theories over complex ones (Occam's Razor).
In other words, Scientism is the conflation of the scientific method with philosophical commitments to methodological naturalism and a strong preference for proactive and presumptive reductionism.
Representative Books
- The God Delusion (Richard Dawkins)
- God: The Failed Hypothesis, How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (Victor J. Stenger)
Critique
Scientism is in decline in popular culture. In what ways this is a helpful and a harmful development is a serious question deserving serious discussion elsewhere /TODO/. However, we feel it is important to point out that scientism as a worldview is fundamentally frail and sickly. Rationality itself demands a much more chastened and careful approach to the use of science than many scienceists will admit to, and science left purely to its own devices is fundamentally nihilistic.
Aeonic Retroprojection
Many scienceists will make fantastically bold claims about events thousands, millions, and even billions of years in the past. Such claims do not follow strictly from science, but largely emerge from the need for scienceists (and their atheistic brethren) to devise a "usable history" for the world, devoid of a morally authoritative creator and law-giver.
The inability of science to make strong claims about events in the distant past follows directly from its cardinal virtues of observability, falsifiability, and repeatability. We are only able to observe the long-past state of the world through highly derivative means -- tree rings, hydrogeographic features, geological strata, etc. This indirect observation is fundamentally different from observing an apple as it falls from a tree or a solar flare as it goes off, because most of the useful information about a given time in the past we wish to "observe" by such means was simply not recorded and we have no way to regain or reconstruct that information. We are left with an underconstrained (and often intractible) inference problem; we have too much room to concoct the "story" of our choosing to fill in these gaps. How are we, then, to judge such candidate stories? Clearly repeatability is a non-starter; we are not able to replay history for our own observation, nor are we able to create another world which we can observe as it and its inhabitants "evolve". So we turn to falsifiability -- if a given story makes a wrong prediction about the state of the current world, then it is false. Rationally, this is a necessary condition for truth, but -- and this is important -- it is not sufficient.
Consider this illustration. I observe the position of three balls on a billiards table and ask myself, "where were they last, before the cue ball was last hit?" I begin my inquiry with a massive set of hypotheses in which I consider every position on the table as possible for each of the three balls. First, I apply common sense and rule out those configurations which are impossible, e.g., those in which two balls intersect in space. I then apply what I know of Newtonian mechanics and deduce that most configurations are simply impossible, and many others are highly improbable. However, I do not have sufficient information to correctly deduce a single solution; without knowing from which angle the cue ball was struck, or with how much force, this will always be an "underconstrained problem", meaning the best I can hope for is to name a large set of possible and probably hypothesis. This is precisely the situation a scienceist finds himself in when he wishes to say something about the condition of the world 10 million years ago. What he is actually doing is taking for granted a large set of assumptions about the angle and force of the cue, and assuring you that it is unreasonable, irrational, superstitious, and unscientific for you to question those assumptions or to consider the implications of changing them.
Indeed, speaking strictly within the scientific worldview and according to the rules of the scientific method, one who make "predictions" about the unobservable past would do well to replace the claim that "the world was such-and-such" with "the most likely explanation of the current observable state of the world is that the world was such-and-so", because the former is an untestable claim about an unobservable and unrepeatable scenario (the historic state of the cosmos), while the latter is a flasifiable claim about a repeatable process (our ability to derive the relative probabilities and utilities of various competing theories explaining the currently available observations).
Of course, given that the axioms of science itself can rightly be called into question, such claims must (in the interest of full epistemological transparency) be weakened further: "Given the information available to us at present, and assuming the world has progressed purely according to repeatable, natural processes without the willful intervention of some supernatural sentient or sentience, the most likely configuration of the world 10 million years hence was such-and-such..." Sadly, most scienceists lack the intellectual modesty (or philosophical honesty) to even admit that these assumptions are assumptions, let alone that reasonable people may find them unjustified or even unacceptable.
Brains in Jars (the teleological failure of Scientism)
A popular game for High School-level philiosophy is to ask whether or not the world is in fact a figment of your imagination, or if perhaps we are all actually brains in jars, being experimented upon by some unseen intelligence. Ultimately, no argument can be made from observation which can refute hypotheses of this form. Scienceists can simply say "this claim is not falsifiable, so it is therefore uninteresting" -- but that says nothing of whether the statement is, in fact, true! Ultimately, the scienceist must then accept that he has nothing of any value to say about whether the world exists and what the nature of the world is. He has trapped himself in Kant's neumenal world, and when it comes to questions of the actual nature of the world as it truly is (its ontology), all they are able (rationally) to say is that "it doesn't matter", that all that matters is that we are able to create useful models of the world as we receive and perceive it. (Most scienceists, of course, will not limit themselves in this way, but they have become fundamentally unscientific in doing so.)
But this is to willfully and knowingly cast aside the most deeply felt areas of human inquiry. Mankind has, since the beginning, asked "why?", but the answer he has sought has very little to do with process and very much to do with purpose. The thinkers of the renaissance and the scientific revolution studied the processes of nature to "think God's thoughts after Him"; understanding the process of physics was seen as a means toward the end of a better comprehension of the Creator's mind, will, and design -- His purpose in and for creation. Pursuing knowledge of purely material processes as themselves, divorced from a concern for teleology (demanding not only the 'how', but the 'why') is a morally vacuous, selfish, prideful exercise in the acquisition of power for the sake of the self.
The Arbitrary Razor
There is no actual rational warrant for Occam's Razor. If two theories explain the facts equally well, then the only rational way to choose between them is to uncover additional facts which differentiate their explicative and predictive power. There is nothing intrinsic to simplicity (or its usual proxies, "intuitive clarity", "reducibility", or "plausibility") that suggests it correlates with truth or even utility (unless, of course, one is willing to make a teleological claim that the universe was somehow meant to be reducible to comprehensible laws, rules, and processes).
Objectives, Asymptotes, and Local Maxima
Science can certainly be said to "work", precisely because its evaluative criteria for any hypothesis is whether it works as an objective, repeatable model for past, present, and future phenomena. However, if we wish to evaluate the current state of the body of scientific knowledge with respect to "truth", we must accept that:
- Science's progress toward "truth" is, at best, asymptotic; science's role is descriptive, and by nature the only description that is identical with the object of description is the object itself, so there will always be some level of disconnect or mismatch.
- Science's progress toward "truth" can easily get caught in local maxima, where its own assumptions back progress into a corner out of which no apparent "scientific" forward progress is possible. In the best of cases, this is indicative of a need for a Kuhnian paradigm shift (a la The Structure of Scientific Revolutions); in other cases, the local maxima is constrained by the scientific method's epistemological assumptions (repeatability and objectivity of observations, etc) or scientism's unevaluatable ontological assumptions (that all phenomena are repeatable and objectively observable, vis a vis naturalism).
Bootstrap
Ultimately, scientism is unable to philosophically account for its own veracity. It is purely utilitarian -- it can make no claims about what is "true", only about what "seems to work". In this way, it can rightly be regarded as rather impoverished philosophically; in seeking to strip all "humanity" out of "human inquiry", the product turns out to be fundamentally uninteresting to the questions that are actually important to human beings -- the questions of meaning and of truth.
What's more, scientism is highly reductionistic, and (per Darwinism) all human thought must be reducible to survival adaptations. This includes the senses, reason, language, and everything that is built upon them -- including scientism and naturalism. Thus, scientism epistemologically hobbles itself, implying that there can be no expectation of actual truth claims -- but what is scientism but a truth claim? So, as a philosophy, scientism renders itself self-referentially incoherent.
The Other Reason Naturalism Is So Popular
Much of the appeal of naturalism is not so much rational as moral, to wit, a rejection of theism can originate from below the belt as much or more than between the ears.
Quotes
Quoth C. S. Lewis,
I was taught at school, when I had done a sum, to "prove my answer." The proof or verification of my Christian answer to the cosmic sum is this. When I accept Theology I may find difficulties, at this point or that, in harmonising it with some particular truths which are embedded in the mythical cosmology derived from science. But I can get in, or allow for, science as a whole. Granted that Reason is prior to matter and that the light of that primal Reason illuminates finite minds, I can understand how men should come, by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand, I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test. This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams: I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner: I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world: the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific point of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else. (The Oxford Socratic Club, 1944, p.165, emphasis mine)
