Against Science: a Brief Reflection

The age of Covid enshrined a growing term we have heard over the last few years, a term which under scrutiny demonstrates not only an insecurity and passivity of modern human thinking but also is in itself absurd, and incongruous with its own premise.  The term is, of course, the mantra to “trust the science”, a phrase which garners just as tenacious a following as the most prominent traditional school of theology.  In essence, this phrase pretty much sums up the modern phenomena of scientism, that “materialist worldview which holds that empirical science can explain everything, including the human world of religious beliefs, sacrificial love, poetry, and morality, since nothing other than matter exists (Dr. Lemmons, Modes of Re-enchantment, p. 1)”.  This is one of the most dangerous modes of disenchantment for the youth of today, offering them a false sense of freedom from responsibility for their own individual thought while also positing an empty promise for a source of knowledge which is sure and concrete, indisputable and attainable.

That man at his essence a spiritual animal is, in itself, a matter of empirical observation.  The concept of individual consciousness and subjectivity bear witness to this statement itself, as do the interpretation of data and the experience of the physical world.  Einstein himself claimed that the preexisting theory will ultimately determine what is observed (today this would be an offshoot of confirmation bias), so that the individual and his spirituality can never truly be separated from the physical world.  In the case of the term “trust the science”, the implication is that the results shown and the ramifications of those results are really dictated in an absolute way by the data: by physical realities observed via experiment or by tool which exist in outside of individual bias.  In reality, what is presented as science cannot properly be equated with sure knowledge or proof, since science itself is humans who develop theories to explain that which has been observed.  Embedded in the very presentation of science is an assumption that some non-material (and therefore spiritual) element was also in place by virtue of the human experience and the human agency when acting upon that data, or rather in a response to that data to determine a theory.  It is precisely in the difference “between experiencing something as happening to oneself and experiencing doing something (Lemmons, p. 2)” that we find the phenomenon of human agency, which cannot be explained away by mere materialism.

Human agency is not the only problem facing scientism, however: the argument all that exists is merely the physical world can itself “not be empirically verified as it must be according to scientism (Lemmons, p. 3)”.  In trying to maintain a worldview providing concrete data, scientism wraps itself in an internal fatal flaw, illogical from the start, especially when it comes to determining the origin of the physical reality.  In a Netflix special, comedian Pete Holmes describes the issue between the start of the universe from a Creator or from nothing like this: “Either you think it’s God, something you can’t see, touch, taste, photograph, and science can’t prove, or you think it’s nothing: something you can’t see, touch, taste, photograph, and science can’t prove” (taken from a Youtube short).  

The spiritual world is scary, since it is the realm of personhood, morality, and God.  Just as one cannot boil personhood down to a series of equations, the knowledge of God cannot be merely reduced to this sure, categorical knowledge.  Scientism arises in the modern world as a simultaneous attempt to find a way to live as if God did not exist and to free ourselves from the responsibility of thinking for ourselves: if all we have to do for knowledge is to trust the data, then there is nothing left for us to determine, and right vs. wrong becomes solely a matter of true or not, in the physical way.  We see in this a level of insecurity, not only at possibly being personally being wrong about truth or reality but about having to live and be accountable to someone else (in this case, God).  Scientism tries to preserve total autonomy while also claiming it to be mere result of the material, failing both in its premise and its conclusions.