SCIENTISM

Some readers may recall my review last year of a book by Huston Smith called Why Religion Matters. In it Huston recounts a lecture he gave on scientism in which he drew sharp, and for him, self-evident distinctions between science as a method of enquiry and scientism as a philosophy or ideology. At the end of the lecture, one of his listeners observed that the trouble was that most scientists don't make the distinction. The heart of the matter is whether science's commitment to naturalism is intrinsic or extrinsic, whether it is simply epistemological or extends to the ontological domain as well.

In this brilliant analysis of scientism – the best I have seen – Mikael Stenmark systematically sets out the claims of scientism and subjects them to critical scrutiny, clearing up a great deal of confusion in the process. In doing so he takes on some of the most prominent popularisers of science – E.O. Wilson, Carl Sagan, Francis Crick, Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins. For these people nothing falls outside the potential purview of science. Stenmark begins by saying that scientism is typically a combination of certain scientific theories 'and a particular ideology or world-view, namely naturalism or materialism'. He argues, rightly, that these are not scientific but philosophical theories and have to be justified as such; they cannot simply be assumed as postulates. This contention, as some readers may know, goes right back to the roots of the Network, whose founders insisted that science does not necessarily entail materialism as a world-view, and indeed that the new science would be compatible with a spiritual world-view.

Before coming to the key claims of scientism, Stenmark distinguishes the 'academic-internal' form from 'academic-external' scientism. The former is the view that genuine non-scientific disciplines can be reduced to or translated into natural science; this is 'methodological scientism', 'the attempt to extend the use of the methods of natural science to other academic disciplines in such a ways that they exclude (or marginalise) previously used methods considered central to these disciplines'. By the same token, academic-external scientism proposes that the essential non-academic areas of human life can be similarly reduced or translated into science – e.g. the sociobiological view of religion. This entails an expansion of science beyond its familiar domain. The rest of this first chapter defines epistemic, rationalistic, ontological, axiological and existential scientism, which are summed up in 'comprehensive scientism', the view that 'science alone will eventually solve all, or almost all, of our genuine problems'.

These definitions set Stenmark up for his systematic analysis of the claims of scientism, which he elaborates in four theses:

T1 The only kind of knowledge we can have is scientific knowledge. T2 The only things that exist are the ones science can discover. T3 Science alone can answer our moral questions and explain as well as

replace traditional ethics. T4 Science alone can answer our existential questions and explain as well as

replace traditional religion.

Beginning with T2 he lays out the Crick and Sagan view of the human being in three propositions: Science has discovered that human beings are made of molecules/neutrons and of assemblages of matter reducible to molecules/neutrons, and of nothing else What science cannot discover does not exist Therefore, human beings are nothing but a collection of molecules/neutrons

The reader can see how the boundaries of science are expanded but also that Crick and Sagan have overlooked a crucial distinction between ontological and methodological reduction. The former may entail the latter but the converse is not the case. If one asks oneself how to set up a scientific experiment to demonstrate that it gives an exhaustive account of reality, then the problem is that 'we must use those methods whose scope is in question to determine the scope of these very same methods'! Non-scientific methods could not produce valid knowledge (T1) but the experimental set-up is self-referential or circular!

T1 is relatively straightforward to refute since scientific knowledge is embedded in many other systems, as Mary Midgley explains: 'the existence of the external world, the reliability of our senses, memory and informants, the validity of logic. If we do believe in these things, we already have a world far wider than that of science.'

Stenmark now comes to T3 – the scientific (Darwinian) explanation of morality. This is based on the premises that the social behaviour of animals is firmly under the control of genes, and has been shaped to give reproductive advantage (maximising fitness); and that humans are animals, so that the same pattern applies to us. Hence culture is subsumed under nature. However, it becomes apparent that this view has limited explanatory power. The following chapter deals with the nature of morality in terms of two Darwinian claims: '(1) that morality is ultimately a matter of selfishness and that (2) the objectivity of morality is an illusion'. The snag in the first claim is the conflation of the moral and biological use of the term 'selfish'; while the second supposes that ethical beliefs are simply a form of evolutionary adaptation. However, the same could be said of science in the sense that it too is the outcome of the evolutionary process.

The last two chapters cover the scientific account of religion and the debunking of traditional religion by science. One of Stenmark's most telling points is that religion addresses existential rather than survival concerns, asking what it means to exist in the world as a human being and how to make the world existentially intelligible. So scientism makes a category error. Religion also implies being transformed by our encounter with the sacred. Once again, distinctions between the metaphysical and the methodological are crucial. Moreover, it is not legitimate to treat religion as a scientific hypothesis. Furthermore, a theism does not so much compete with science as with naturalism. Stenmark concludes that it is invalid for science to set both the limits of our knowledge and of reality, and that we must beware of conflating science and philosophy, more specifically with naturalism. As readers will appreciate, this is a highly systematic work that repays careful study and is a seminal contribution to the science and religion debate.