Scientism is the view that the only things that can be known are things that can be discovered through science. That’s a very popular view, but there are at least three things wrong with it.
First, Tough Questions Answered quotes philosopher Ed Feser, who says that the enterprise of science makes assumptions that cannot be justified by science itself.
Feser writes:
Of its very nature, scientific investigation takes for granted such assumptions as that: there is a physical world existing independently of our minds; this world is characterized by various objective patterns and regularities; our senses are at least partially reliable sources of information about this world; there are objective laws of logic and mathematics that apply to the objective world outside our minds; our cognitive powers – of concept-formation, reasoning from premises to a conclusion, and so forth – afford us a grasp of these laws and can reliably take us from evidence derived from the senses to conclusions about the physical world; the language we use can adequately express truths about these laws and about the external world; and so on and so on.
Science assumes that those things are true, it cannot discover them.
Second, scientism cannot account for things we know apart from science.
William Lane Craig explains:
First, scientism is too restrictive a theory of knowledge. It would, if adopted, compel us to abandon wide swaths of what most of us take to be fields of human knowledge. Your friend admits this with regard to moral and aesthetic truths. On his view there is nothing good or evil, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly. But is it plausible to think that there are no aesthetic or moral truths? On your friend’s view there’s nothing wrong with torturing a little girl to death. Why should we accept such a conclusion simply because of a epistemological restriction? Isn’t this a signal that we need rather to broaden the scope of our theory so as to encompass other types of knowledge? Your friend says he will treat logical and mathematical truths as merely empirical truths. Good luck! Truths like “If p implies q, and p, then q” or “2 + 2 = 4” are to all appearances necessary truths, not merely empirical generalizations.
Third, scientism is self-refuting.
William Lane Craig explains:
Secondly, scientism is self-refuting. Scientism tells us that we should not believe any proposition that cannot be scientifically proven. But what about that very proposition itself? It cannot itself be scientifically proven. Therefore we should not believe it. Scientism thus defeats itself.
You can’t prove scientism (a theory of what we can know) using science. It refutes itself.
So, there are three reasons to reject scientism. Nothing I have said here should be taken as criticism of science, though. On the contrary – the progress of science is one of the best friends of Christian theists. We have gained a lot from the advances made by science in areas like cosmology, cosmic fine-tuning, the origin of life, the fossil record, and astrobiology. We love science. But scientism is false.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
I really fell for scientism in my youth. Thank you Carl Sagan – NOT! :-( It is embarrassing to me that the obvious self-refuting nature of scientism was not so obvious to me, since I had such a high view of my own impeccable logic. I think that scientism is a serious trap for many post-modernists, who have fallen so hard for relative truth (self-refuting) and moral relativism (unlivable). How prevalent is the concept of scientism in the American church?
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Oh my God, Carl Sagan was an imbecile. He thought that the oscillating model was true. It suited his naturalism, and he didn’t give a crap about actual evidence. And yet there he was blabbing his nonsense in all our schools and misleading everyone with idle speculations.
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Yep, and I was a double imbecile to believe him when he said that “the Cosmos is all that is, or was, or ever will be.” I never asked myself how he could know such a thing. Technically speaking, Carl was calling himself “god” with such a statement.
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I don’t know about calling himself God, but this was during the time that they were finding evidence for the birth of the universe. So this guy was basically peddling speculative nonsense in the public schools, and misleading everyone.
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he view that the only things that can be known are things that can be discovered through science. That’s a very popular view
Even more than being a “popular” view, I would say it’s kind of the default view, at least among certain circles.
You occasionally hear commentators lament the deplorable “lack of respect for science” in society today. I say the opposite: the ubiquity of scientism is proof that people have too much respect for science.
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I’ve heard the “lack of respect” claim as well. However, I think what people respect less today are -scientists-, not -science- itself, and for good reason (I agree with you; people still think science is capable of more than it really is).
For years, we’ve basically been told that every scientist is a perfect pursuer of the truth and that no scientist is biased. Then predictions of climate disasters didn’t come true, thousands of peer reviewed papers made wild theoretical claims, and now people are a bit more skeptical, as they should be.
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Isn’t that the truth, Josh?!? I will never forget when Carl Sagan, my hero, made a totally illogical argument for why life in the womb becomes life in the 2nd or 3rd trimester, not at conception. He violated so many Logic 101 rules that I simultaneously and immediately became pro-life and anti-scientism. Thank you, Carl! :-)
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It looks like your third thing is the same as your first. Science makes an assumption that it can’t justify.
Actually, every system of thought needs to start with some ‘a priori’ assumption that it cannot justify. Even religion starts out with such assumptions. This doesn’t make either science or religion self-refuting.
After all, just because you can’t justify a belief, that doesn’t mean the belief is wrong. It might really be true.
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Actually, John, the third statement is not an a priori assumption: it is a self-refuting statement. It is like the following statement: “This sentence is not written in English.” The statement actually disproves itself, and is therefore utter nonsense. An a priori assumption can not be proven true or false, but a self-refuting statement is false by definition under the rules of logic, specifically the Law of Non-Contradiction.
Another example would be “There are no absolute truths.” This sentence is an absolute truth claim that there are no absolute truths. All of these sentences contradict themselves so as to make themselves meaningless.
So, yes, we know that the statement “the only truths are those verified by science” is untrue because the statement cannot be verified by science and is therefore meaningless and self-contradictory. (Not to mention that there are many objective concepts that we take as true – love, hate, math, science itself – that are not measurable using science.) Every time we try to avoid the Law of Non-Contradiction, it rears its ugly head and reappears.
This is proof that our brains are wired with this Law, and for the theist, that God does not contradict Himself. It also proves why the so-called eastern both-and “logic” is necessarily false. (If you don’t believe that, then please attempt a conversation with a Zen Buddhist in which he is required to hold to the usage of both-and “logic.” I have tried and the Zenner violates himself right out of the starting gate, with basic grammar usage. If the Zenner says “I hate George W. Bush,” your reply would be “Then what you are saying is that you love George W. Bush.” watch for the reaction to that! :-) That is one necessary consequence of both-and “logic.”)
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An assumption is not the same as a self-refuting statement. That’s why they are two points.
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Physical science has dependencies on other things (logic, the existence of a human mind to comprehend it, an ordered and repeatable universe, the reality of the physical world, mathematics itself, and more). The rules of logic may be basic assumptions about the universe, but science (and Scientism) are built upon far too many things to be basic assumptions themselves.
Scientism itself claims that the only way we can know anything about the world is through empirical physical science, which denies this structure, making it self-refuting.
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Sometimes a mnemonic helps me remember key points against a false concept, like scientism.
Picture a bicep labeled Assumptions, a shackle around the wrist labeled Restrictions, and a finger-pointing-hand labeled Mission. The Assumptions of scientism (like logic and the reliability of the senses) give scientism its big “bicep”; its muscle, its power. Yet scientism argues against these assumptions. The shackle of Restrictions refers to the fact that scientism is too restrictive, too narrow, too limited (for example, scientsim denies morality). The finger-pointing-hand labeled Mission symbolizes the fact that scientism points its finger to other views as unworthy of belief, but in the process it points at itself as unworthy. (Like the saying, when you point at someone else, you have “several” fingers pointing back at yourself). With this mnemonic you can A.R.M. yourself against scientism, by pointing out scientism’s Assumptions, Restrictions, and self-destructive Mission.
It really is surprising how prevalent scientism is, when you think about .it.
JC
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I was looking for a page like this, and am glad to find there are others who feel as I do about scientism. I work in a Welsh university, which is steeped in scientism and the tenet that science will ultimately describe and reduce everything to algoriths.
We are, according to scientism, little organisms with 5 senses and no other means of perception. Everything that science can quantify is measured, directly or indirectly, through the mediation of those 5 senses. So scientism makes the vastly arrogant assumption that everything in the cosmos is limited to 5 little human senses.
We have a reasonably effective neuroprocessor, which receives input from 5 human senses, filters and selectively selects them through the cortical associative areas and represents them to our consciousness – ‘in a glass, darkly’, you might say and indeed as St. Paul said. We see things as we are, not as they are. We see a fragment of a whole we have no faculty to process. But still, science will explain it all. Sure it will, as long as you are a little 5-sensed organism with a rational filter of a cortex.
I’m surfing the internet after working on my dissertation for some 6 years now (part-time, as I work full-time). Slightly worryingly I’ve been told what a ‘courageous’ approach I’ve adopted by discussing late ancient saints’ lives and medieval grail literature with plain empathy to religious traditions. But I’m not in a science discipline, and if I were I think I might encounter more worrying comments than that.
Best wishes to you for your stance in representing Christianity
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