Worldviews, Epistemology, and Scientism, Part I


“Do not believe something just because a scientist—perhaps a world-renowned scientist—declares it to be so.”

Many scientists who should know better simply do not know what they are talking about.

Such scientists hold to what may be called scientism—the idea that scientific knowledge is the only true knowledge there is.

Examples:

The late Carl Sagan began a highly touted program on astronomy (The Cosmos) with these words: “the universe is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.”

Think about it. How could anyone ever know that? Had Sagan examined all Reality and scientifically concluded that there exists nothing other than the material universe of space and time? Obviously not. Philosophers (and other thoughtful people who think carefully) know that Sagan was making a faith statement—proclaiming an assumption very much like the opening of the book of Genesis, where the author states “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

There is no scientific evidence for either proposition. We all know, however, that the Bible is making a philosophic statement (or theological, if you prefer) while Sagan pretended to import his faith statement under the guise of science.

In 2007 several best-selling books came out by anti-theistic authors. "The God Delusion" by evolutionist Richard Dawkins was the most notable. Unfortunately it was laced with invective, ridicule, and logical errors that showed more reliance on emotion than reason.

How can it be that such people, admittedly brilliant in their fields, can be so off track?

Here is a major reason—they do not grasp the rudiments of epistemology.

One can hardly blame them. Most of us are impatient with essentials that are hidden from view. I would much rather use my computer than learn how it works—motherboards and all that. I am all about showers but I am not interested in the geometry of drains or the chemistry of sewage treatment plants. Similarly, we tend to dive into the deep waters of the meaning of life and the wonders of the universe without asking how it is we can arrive at knowledge, truth, and wisdom in the first place. That requires epistemology. Not sexy, not sexy at all.

Sexy or not, let’s take a look.

All this philosophy is mostly about worldviews: what is the meaning of life; what kind of universe do we live in; how should we conduct ourselves?

The answers that we come up with are based on an epistemological foundation. How do we know anything? Is knowledge reliable? What is truth? What are the methods and limits of human knowledge? These are issues that will determine what philosophical answers we give to the worldview questions.

Let’s assume we want solid knowledge, not just ideas that sound good or make us comfortable.

Knowledge consists of our ideas about things. These ideas make up our worldview. Those ideas must be based in evidences. They cannot just be picked randomly out of the air. This is the first key to a respectable position on the grand questions facing us.

The second key must answer the question: what shall count as evidence? The answer to this question will pre-determine the final outcome of our search for knowledge. It determines on the one hand what knowledge is possible and on the other hand what ideas are impossible and thus can be rejected out of hand.

Let’s use an analogous example, farfetched though it is.

Suppose we decide that only naturally visible and audible parts of the spectrum will be accepted as evidence for what is real. In other words, if we cannot see it with unaided eye or ear it will not count as evidence. That being the case, someone who talks about neutrinos would be thought to be talking only of superstitious nonsense in the same category as ghosts who allegedly wander about on Halloween. Or someone who said his dog alerted him to the presence of something by detecting sounds that only dogs can hear would be dismissed as a dreamer. Not to mention gamma rays and ultra-violet frequencies of the spectrum.

Now let us apply this to actual debates about what reality is and how we know it.

The materialist (or philosophical naturalist, to be more precise) arbitrarily limits evidence to the empirical. That is, to what can based in a sensory experience of some kind, often now aided by sophisticated scientific tools. In other words, if we cannot measure it with scientific instruments or imagine some scientific test that one day could measure it, it is not a part of what is real.

To insist, then, as some do, that there is no evidence for God or the soul, is to adopt as an unsubstantiated pre-supposition this rule of thinking: all evidence has to be “scientific” (empirical) evidence.

Can this pre-supposition be defended? By what reasoning do we conclude that only empirical, “scientific” evidence shall be admissible regarding knowledge claims?

Whatever reasons we give in defense of this pre-supposition, those reasons obviously cannot be empirical evidences. The idea “all knowledge is scientific knowledge” is not a scientific statement nor scientifically demonstrable. If only more scientists understood this there would be more openness and less dogmatism in their pronouncements—many of which seem more like religious beliefs than philosophical knowledge.

There may be avenues to knowledge other than the scientific or empirical avenue. In fact, the materialist scientist relies upon one of these additional avenues—logical reasoning. The soundness of logical reasoning is not scientifically provable. Yet it must be embraced before any scientific knowledge can be pursued. The implications of this for the naturalist will be explored in what follows.