Myths Which Dominate Our Culture

Living the Good Life

Scientism is the belief that the only existing reality is matter, time, space, and waves.  One can learn truths and make discoveries about matter by means of physical sciences.  There is no other way to truth and knowledge.  

All materialists are expositors of the philosophy of scientism, or when inconsistent with the hard, brute realities of scientism, they become mere sentimentalists.  Imagine the materialist scientist professing his devotion and love to a female who has caught his eye.  "Why do you want to shack up with me?", she inquires.  "Will your love be exclusive, permanent--the love of lifelong fidelity--or will it be the passing moment of a biological urge?"

"Ah, my dearest, I love you," he breaths fervently.  But as materialists both the breather and the one breathed upon know that he is lying and his words are mere vanity.
 And if, perchance, they actually believe the words portray the existence of something genuine, something really there, their beliefs ridicule their scientism.  They are asserting, in fact, that something far more important than matter actually does exist--something that not just merely exists, but something immaterial which is fundamental to their being.

This paradox of living in denial is common amongst all Unbelievers, who, as the Apostle of Christ writes, "suppress the truth in unrighteousness."  [Romans 1: 18]  It is particularly evident amongst the materialists of our day who own the philosophy of scientism.

David Berlinski writes:

The claim that the existence of God should be treated as a scientific question stands on a destructive dilemma: If by science one means the great theories of mathematical physics, then the demand is unreasonable.  We cannot treat any claim in this way.  There is n other intellectual activity in which theory and evidence have reached this stage of development.

If, on the other hand, the demand means merely that one should treat the existence of God as the existence of anything would be treated, then we must accept the fact that in life as it is lived beyond mathematical physics, the evidence is fragmentary, lost, partial, and inconclusive.  We do what we can.  We grope.  We see glimmers.  [David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p.60.]

At times scientists arise who have the self-awareness and integrity to acknowledge that scientism excludes from the outset the very possibility of God.  It has nothing to do with evidence, or argument, or analysis.  It simply cannot be the case that God exists.  This represents part of scientism's confession of faith.  Carl Friedrich Weizsäcker has confessed that scientism's rejection of God comes not from its conclusions, but from its premisses: "it is not by its conclusions but by its methodological starting point that modern science excludes direct creation.  Our methodology would not be honest if this fact were denied . . . such is the faith in the science of our time, and which we all share."   [Cited in Berlinski, ibid., p. 61]

Too true.