What is Scientism?

Scientism is a word that many people may not have heard of, but it is fast becoming a hot topic as its use is growing and more people as starting to understand what it means.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines Scientism as:

"The collection of attitudes and practices considered typical of scientists; or The belief that the investigative methods of the physical sciences are applicable or justifiable in all fields of inquiry."
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Recently as the term is becoming more used Evolutionists are showing themselves to be defensive of having this label applied to them.

The AHD definition does not seem particularly offensive, so it may lead you to wonder why Evolutionists can be so defensive when the term Scientism is directed at them.

This may be because the definition given by The American Heritage Dictionary has been written with a politically correct non-offensive style to it, but the origins of the term in philosophical writings of people like Sir Karl Popper show that the word Scientism was created to imply a religiously blinded view of science by means of applying Methodological Naturalism or Empiricism as a rule to all science and to the exclusion of any other.

So in the AHD definition, the emphasis that is missed is that Scientism is trying to claim exclusivity to truth, reason and science and in doing so it is making metaphysical claims by convention.

Another element of the argument about Scientism is the applicability in science of Inductive Reasoning and Deductive Reasoning.

Deductive Reasoning takes 2 premises (assumed or apparent facts) and combines them to reach a conclusion. So in example you are walking along and you feel that there is a strong wind blowing in your face, then some dirt gets in your eye, so you deduce by taking the premise that wind can blew dirt around, and the premise that you got dirt in your eye whilst the wind was blowing, and from that you conclude that the wind blew the dirt into your eye.

Inductive Reasoning will take a set of common facts to establish a premise, and from that premise it will assume a conclusion (theory). So in example again the dirt gets in your eye, but this time you don’t have a prior knowledge that the wind can blow dirt around so instead you examine many different possibilities of how the dirt could have got into your eye. eg: maybe it dropped out of your hair into your eye, or maybe it was on your eyelash and dropped in, or maybe someone threw it into your eye. If you are able to observe the same thing happening many times then this will start to eliminate some of the potential causes until you reach the premise that each time you go out in a strong wind you get dirt in your eye. From that premise you make the conclusion (theory) that a strong wind will blow dirt in your eye.

So the Methodological Naturalist argument against Christians/Theists is that they are using deductive reasoning, and the Naturalists claim that deductive reasoning is not scientific because there might be millions of other possible explanations (regardless of the improbability of those other explanations) which should be considered.

The other aspect of the Methodological Naturalist's argument against Christians/Theists is to assert that God cannot be a natural/empirical cause for things. They always refer to God as being purely in the realm of metaphysics and not to be discussed in the natural realm.

So when you take these two assertions together that only inductive reasoning can be used and that God cannot be considered a natural/empirical cause of anything, then you have essentially determined that God has no place in logic or reason regarding anything in the natural world.

In this way, the useful method of scientific analysis which is Methodological Naturalism can be hijacked by people that have religious/philosophical motivations to remove all consideration of God as being involved in the natural world. That is what is being described when the term Scientism is directed at Evolutionists today.

The irony of the Evolutionist argument is that they are actually using deductive reasoning themselves, because they always have the following two premises as the basis of every theory and the conclusion is always the same also:

Premise 1. (Whatever happened) God did not do it
Premise 2. (Whatever happened) Something must have caused it
Conclusion - Theory. (Whatever happened), happened by purely naturalistic means

Evolutionary theory changes so much (which even Evolutionists confess) because premise 1 and premise 2 are always the same, and the conclusion/theory is always the same, so therefore what has to change is the (whatever happened) part inside the brackets. eg: if evolution didn't happen slowly then it must have happened fast. If we did not evolve from this animal then we must have evolved from a different animal. They just won't consider that fact that it could not have happened.

It is easy to demonstrate how Scientism is applied by the following steps;
1. Pick something that God is supposed to be involved in. (eg: creation of the universe)
2. Falsely assert that God cannot be considered as a natural or empirical cause of anything
3. Make a rule that Mythological Naturalism and Empiricism are the only valid forms of scientific enquiry
4. Now that you have ruled God out of any scientific reason for things happening, turn your eye back to point number one and start coming up with theories of how that thing which God is supposed to be involved in might be able to happen without Him by some other Natural or Empirical cause.
5. Get a bunch of people to come up with any possible naturalistic reason they can.
6. Pick the conclusion which is least ridiculous and claim that it is what "we" (asserting that you speak collectively for all intelligentsia) now understand to be the truth of the matter as revealed by science
7. Take all the other crazy theories that have been based on your Premise 1 and Premise 2, stick then in a draw and save them for a rainy day because when the current best theory is proven wrong you get out the next best theory and claim that it is now what science has revealed to be true because now technology has advanced.

In this way the gullible masses will be waiting on your every Evolutionist word, not knowing what to believe from day to day because each theory is about good enough for another 10 years. But they can rest assured that each variation of the theory will have essentially the same premises and conclusion as predefined by Scientism.

Now I think it worth addressing the common assertion that God cannot be considered in naturalistic/empirical science as a cause for something.
    First: Naturalistic or empirical causes can be anything which has existence or influence in the material world. Considering that Christians acknowledge Jesus Christ as both a materially existing man as well as being God the assertion that such a God cannot have a material influence in the natural world is patently false. Jesus Christ is recorded in history both by Christian and non-Christian scholars and no reputable historian would deny that He existed as a man in Palestine in the first century AD. Therefore it is perfectly scientifically valid to claim that Jesus walked and talked and did things in this world that would have been observable in an empirical sense at the time that they occurred. The New Testament gospels are written on this basis of written accounts of empirically evidenced events.
    Likewise considering that the Genesis account of God's act of creation are written as documenting the oral accounts of eye witness testimony, this too is able to be accepted as a premise of God's material influence in this natural world. In no way does the Bible claim that God is unable to influence the natural world and therefore the assertion that God should be treated as someone outside of the zone of natural influence is again patently false.
    Considering that the debate between evolutionists and Christians is significantly about how to interpret past events, it a must be acknowledged that to assert that God can have no scientifically valid influence in the world or to be considered by science as a cause for anything is as ridiculous as claiming that Pontius Pilate cannot be considered a scientifically valid cause for anything that ever actually happened.

Now let’s look at the second premise of Scientism and Evolutionism which is to claim that something must have caused things to become the way they are now. In other words they invoke Reductionism to try and go back further and further, because to them there is no start of something existing in its natural form, no point of creation prior to which we need not go.

The theory of Intelligent Design which includes the strong argument of Irreducable Complexity in nature has raised the point in scientific reasoning that if something can’t go back any further in simplicity then it is scientifically valid to accept that it started out that way, and if that implies that someone designed or made it to be the way it is then so what? Tell us why that is so objectionable.
The answer to why it is so objectionable is because it breaches both the first and second premises of Scientism and Evolutionism.

It does seem that in the broader community and in many scientific communities the cat is out of the bag about the nature of ideological Scientism and Theists are starting to reply to the ideologues of Scientism that Theists will not longer accept having such restrictions placed on their freedom of scientific enquiry, and freedom of religion.

Make no mistake about it, Evolutionism and Scientism are inseparable, they are religious philosophies started by religious men. The Atheists assert their claim to be free of Christian dogma, and now has come the time that Christians and Theists are claiming their right to be free of the dogmas of Evolutionism and Scientism.