Examination of the Atheists’ use of Science against faith: Scientism as a Worldview

 Examination of the Atheists’ use of Science against faith: Scientism as a Worldview.

 

David Mills, Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person’s Answer to Christian Fundamentalism. Ulysses Press, 2006.

https://www.iep.utm.edu/n-athxxx/

 

Scientism is the view that the hard sciences—like chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy—provide the only genuine knowledge of reality. At the very least, this scientific knowledge is vastly superior to what we can know from any other discipline. Ethics and religion may be acceptable, but only if they are understood to be inherently subjective and regarded as private matters of opinion. According to scientism, the claim that ethical and religious conclusions can be just as factual as science, and therefore ought to be affirmed like scientific truths, maybe a sign of bigotry and intolerance.

According to Duke University Philosophy Professor Alex Rosenberg, scientism is the worldview that all atheists share. It “is the conviction that the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything, that . . . science provides all the significant truths about reality. . . . Being scientific just means treating science as our exclusive guide to reality”.

 

In early twenty-first century a prominent book on atheism became very prominent. These authors include Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins states that faith is blind trust without evidence and even against the evidence. He follows up in The God Delusion with the claim that faith is evil because it does not require justification and does not tolerate argument. Harris’s articulation of the nature of faith is closer to Dawkins’ earlier view. He says that religious faith is an unjustified belief in matters of ultimate concern.  According to Harris, faith is the permission religious people give one another to believe things strongly without evidence. Hitchens says that religious faith is ultimately grounded in wishful thinking. For his part, Dennett implies that belief in God cannot be reasonable because the concept of God is too radically indeterminate for the sentence “God exists” to express a genuine proposition. 

Atheists subscribe to some version or other of scientism as their criterion for rational belief.  According to scientism, empirical science is the only source of our knowledge of the world (strong scientism) or, more moderately, the best source of rational belief about the way things are (weak scientism). Harris and Dawkins are quite explicit about this. Harris equates a genuinely rational approach to spiritual and ethical questions with a scientific approach to these sorts of questions. Dawkins insists that the presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is a scientific question. The Atheists also affirm evidentialism, the claim that a belief can be epistemically justified only if it is based on adequate evidence. The conjunction of scientism and evidentialism entails that a belief can be justified only if it is based on adequate scientific evidence. The New Atheists’ conclusion that belief in God is unjustified follows, then, from their addition of the claim that there is inadequate scientific evidence for God’s existence (and even adequate scientific evidence for God’s non-existence).  Dawkins argues that the “God Hypothesis” is the claim that there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe is “founded on local traditions of private revelation rather than evidence”.

 

For the Atheists, the world of science and religion is black and white. They regard it conflicting and antagonistic. They tend to speak about “the Church” and “Christianity” as if they are fixed, homogeneous entities, whereas they allow “science” to change and modernize over time. This makes it very easy for them to say that science, which in their view is fully up to date, necessarily conflicts with religion, which in their view is stuck hopelessly in the past.

 

Dialogical between Scientist and Atheist 

Scientists are not necessarily atheists. According to a 2009 Pew poll, 59% of scientists believe there is a God or higher power. In other words, the majority of scientists are not atheists. This makes sense because there is nothing fundamental in science that would require a good scientist to turn away all religion. Science and religion deal with entirely different facets of existence. Science is not an alternative to religion, because it is not a religion at all. Science is not a particular tradition spelled out by a handful of geniuses. In fact, there is no such thing as one, golden-standard Scientific Method. Rather, science is an umbrella term that encompasses all physical truths that are arrived at through repeated observations and through the application of models that successfully predict observations. Science is confined strictly to the observable world, and therefore has nothing to say about any non-observable realm. A scientist that claims that science proves God does not exist is simply a poor scientist. Such a scientist has turned science into his own personal religion. Honest and logically consistent scientists may privately lean towards atheism or towards religion, but they know that science itself is agnostic. Scientists are free to be atheists in good faith, but that is just their personal faith and is not supported by science. Claiming that a strictly observation-based methodology such as science has anything to say about physically unobservable realms is simply illogical. Religion deals mainly with the field of physically unobservable entities: good, evil, love, hate, holiness, sin, spirit, heaven, and God. While the spiritual realm is beyond physical observation, most religions believe that it is still accessible to the human experience through non-physical senses which are given names such as enlightenment, the soul, the inner spirit, the mind's eye, inspiration, consciousness, etc.

 

Remarks on Scientism and Science against Faith 

The weakness of scientism can be seen in the debate between evolution and creationism. Neither evolution nor creationism can be proved via controlled laboratory experiments using well-defined principles of the scientific method; therefore, how can one reject either one out of hand simply through the application of fundamental beliefs? Scientism relies upon untestable assumptions yet still draw conclusions that its adherents feel are favorable, and Christians draw conclusions using observations of life, behavior, and even thought patterns influenced by the Holy Spirit.

We as human beings have moral and religious beliefs. Just as scientism sees fit to define itself with knowledge from outside the scientific realm, those who are not adherents of scientism inform their beliefs with knowledge from outside the scientific realm, viz., from religion and philosophy. And there is much in life that cannot be measured, quantified, or defined scientifically—everyday issues concerning trust, love, and relationships, for example, are beyond the realm of science. As C. S. Lewis wrote, “To be incommunicable by Scientific language is, so far as I can judge, the normal state of experience”. 

At the end of the day, scientism, with its over-valuation of science, is a religion, just as Christianity is a religion. One offers hope for the future and eternal life. The other does not. When the Book of Life spoken of in Revelation 20:12 is opened, you will want your name to be found there, with the names of all the others who have trusted Jesus Christ. It is Jesus who saves, not our understanding of science.

 

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