BRANDON:
You spend several pages engaging scientism. How do you define this
notoriously controversial term? Why is scientism popular today, and why
do you think it's self-defeating?
DR. EDWARD FESER: This too is
addressed in the book at length. Briefly, scientism is the view that
science alone gives us knowledge of reality. Of course, that just raises
the question of what we mean by “science.” One problem with scientism
is that if you define “science” narrowly -- so that it includes physics
and chemistry, say, but not philosophy or theology -- then scientism
ends up being self-refuting, because it is not itself a scientific claim
but a philosophical one. On the other hand, if you define “science”
broadly enough so that it avoids being self-refuting, then it becomes
vacuous, because it now no longer rules out philosophy, theology, or
pretty much anything else adherents of scientism want to be able to
dismiss without a hearing as “unscientific.”
A second problem
with scientism is that science cannot in principle give us a complete
description of the world, both because science takes for granted certain
assumptions it cannot justify in a non-circular fashion (such as that
perception is reliable, that there is order in the world that is really
there and not just projected onto it by the mind, etc.), and because the
methods of science of their nature can obscure as much as they reveal.
For example, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell -- who was no friend of
Scholasticism or of religion -- often emphasized, the methods of
physics give us only the abstract mathematical structure of physical
reality, but do not and cannot tell us the intrinsic nature of whatever
is the underlying reality that has that structure.
A third
problem is science cannot in principle provide a complete explanation of
the phenomena it describes. Science explains things by tracing them
down to ever deeper laws of nature. But what it cannot tell you is what a
“law of nature” is in the first place and why it operates. It really is
amazing how unreflectively atheists and advocates of scientism appeal
to the notion of “laws,” given how deeply philosophically problematic
the very notion is. Earlier generations of scientists were aware of the
philosophical puzzles raised by the nature of scientific explanation,
and some contemporary scientists (such as Paul Davies) are also
sensitive to the puzzles raised by the very idea of a “law of nature”
(which is actually a holdover from an idiosyncratic theology to which
Descartes and Newton were committed, but which Aristotelian and
Scholastic philosophers reject just as much as atheists do).
But
most contemporary scientists tend not to have the general education that
figures of the generation of Einstein, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg did.
They don’t know philosophy well, and they also don’t know what they
don’t know. This goes double for the more aggressively atheistic ones
among them -- people like Lawrence Krauss, Peter Atkins, Richard
Dawkins, and Jerry Coyne. Hence they repeatedly commit very crude
philosophical mistakes but also refuse to listen or respond when these
mistakes are pointed out to them.
Anyway, the main reason
scientism has the following it does is probably that people are, quite
rightly, impressed with the technological and predictive successes of
modern science. The trouble is that this simply gives us no reason
whatsoever to believe scientism -- that is to say, it gives us no reason
to believe that science alone gives us knowledge. To draw that
conclusion you need to assume that if something is real, then it will be
susceptible of a precise mathematical description that will make strict
prediction and technological application possible. Now that is itself a
philosophical or metaphysical assumption, not a scientific one. But it
is also an assumption that there is not only no reason to believe, but
decisive reason to reject, as I argue in the book.
What the
mathematically-oriented methods of modern physics do is to focus on
those aspects of nature which can be strictly predicted and controlled
and to ignore anything that doesn’t fit that method. As a result,
physics tends brilliantly to uncover those aspects of reality that fit
that method, and which can therefore be exploited technologically. But
it simply does not follow that there are no other aspects of reality. To
think otherwise is like the drunk’s fallacy of assuming that his lost
car keys must be under the street lamp somewhere, because that is where
the light is.
