Scientism

I couldn’t help but agreeing with Gil Grissom from CSI when he quipped, “Most people assume that scientists are ethical. The truth is, a lot of them are no better than politicians.” Science is often portrayed as a discipline that is the most serious, most authoritative and most valuable. But is this really so? Is every other intellectual activity inferior to science and does science have no limits? Strong scientism would say yes, and it would be very wrong. In fact, it is actually self-refuting. According to J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, “Strong scientism is not itself a proposition of science, but a second-order proposition of philosophy about science which asters that only scientific propositions are true and/or rational to believe.” No amount of progress in science will have the slightest effect in making strong scientism true.

Nicholas in The Limits of Science sums it up nicely: “The theorist who maintains that science is the be-all and end-all – that what is not in science textbooks is not worth knowing – is an ideologist with a peculiar and distorted doctrine of his own. For him, science is no longer a sector of the cognitive enterprise but an all-inclusive world-view. This is the doctrine not of science but scientism. To take this stance is not to celebrate science but to distort it.”