Scientism

Scientism is the idea that science alone, gives us objective knowledge ie that science alone reliably exposes the world to us as it actually is. Edward Feser in his Book Scholastic Metaphysics argues that there are "no good arguments whatsoever for scientism, and decisive arguments against it."

Rather, he claims that ancient scholastic metaphysics, typified by Thomas Aquinas, has much more to say about how the world actually is than natural science.

He argues that the idea that "the methods of science are the only reliable way to secure knowledge of anything" is not itself a scientific claim that can be established with the scientific method. How could such statement be tested?

Surely the statement is not a scientific statement but a philosophical one. It's truth or falsehood cannot be tested in a laboratory but the philosopher would certainly have something to say about it.

Feser points out that the scientific method relies on a number of philosophical assumptions: that there is an objective world external to the minds of scientists, that this world is governable by regularities of the sort that can be captured in scientific laws and that human perception can uncover and describe these regularities.

It is therefore absurd to state that the only way we can know about the world is through scientific speculation since this activity is dependent upon assumptions that are not established by science. The argument is circular.

This should be the death knell of scientism, but there is more. Not only does science rely on philosophical assumptions for its methodology it also relies on philosophy to interpret its results. "For example, is the world fundamentally comprised of substance or events? What is it to be a "cause"? What is the nature of the universals referred to in scientific laws – concepts like quark, electron, atom, and so on? … Do scientific theories really give us a description of objective reality in the first place or are they just useful tools for predicting the course of experience?"

It would seem that philosophy is the rational basis of science and there is a case for saying that philosophy is the very paradigm of rationality, not science.

The reason that science cannot give us a complete description of reality is that it is, by its nature, quantitative. Physics can only capture those aspects of reality that are "susceptible of the prediction and control of characteristics of quantifiable phenomena." Other phenomena that may not be measured or described mathematically fall through the scientists methodological net.

Feser uses the example of using a metal detector. Such use will only tell us about the presence of metals, it will not give us anything else. Thus empirical science will only give us information for which it is suited.

Our experience of nature is not quantitative but qualitative. All of our perceptions of the world are qualitative, we smell, hear sounds, see vistas etc. Indeed, we know about gravity in our every waking moment through the sense of our bodies. We do not know about it because we have learnt Newton's inverse square law or the idea that mass distorts space courtesy of Einstein. Theories about gravity are abstractions that do not enter into our experience of the world except if we are trying to lob a missile on a distant city or get a spacecraft to the moon.

The problem with scientism, especially those who are trained in a scientific discipline, is that there is a danger that it restricts what we understand as knowledge. If the only trustworthy knowledge is that described by natural science we are at a loss to understand art, theology, literature or love. We are thus doomed to becoming someone who lives on some spectrum of autism.

Scientific education is important for giving us a view of the world. The scepticism bred by such education will allow us to judge between bogus natural therapies poor theological constructions and the claims by multinational corporations about their products. Science is useful.

Science does affect the way we understand the world. The heliocentric model of the solar system tells us that the sun does not rise or set but the earth rotates. Here our experience is contradicted by scientific knowledge. That we cling to common experience is demonstrated by the way we still refer to the sun rising and setting. It seems that first hand experience trumps scientific knowledge.

But that brings us back to our point, science is useful for predicting and planning and making judgments about what can and cannot happen in the world, but it is not an exclusive and accurate description of the world because most of our experience of life falls through its net.

Feser promotes an unpopular idea, that scholasticism, a product of the medieval or the dark ages, provides a metaphysics that is still relevant to how we understand the world. Certainly the scholastics made mistakes of interpretation that the natural sciences corrected, but they provided a reliable way of talking about the world. The scholastics laid out a rational language to describe causation that is still relevant to day.

Such rational language was not restricted to physical things but included an analysis of the arts. This essay is obviously not the place for a detailed argument but there are a growing number of followers of Thomas Aquinas (Thomists) that are retrieving metaphysical language that was lost following the depredations of Scotus, Ockham, Descartes and Hume to name but a few.

While natural science abhors teleological explanations and seeks physical causation, scholasticism would point out that there is an ordering in our world that orders, for example, the man to the women and the subsequent generation of a family. The attempt by biologists to describe this phenomenon in terms of evolutionary theory or human psychology etc. will always fail to provide a complete description of the phenomenon. Such attempts are always reductive. They attempt to describe complex human behaviour in terms of lower levels of physical causation be that evolutionary theory, biochemistry or physiology. What we get is a jumble of lower order explanations but we do not get the whole picture.

Similar things can be said about the attempt by neurosciences to get some kind of grip on the origin of consciousness. We get some details about the activation of certain areas of the brain during mental activity but this does not give us any idea of the nature of thought production.

Science is great. Just the act of typing these words involves a profound understanding of material science, electronics, engineering and programming. But as useful as the sciences are they will not tell me who I am or what my life might mean. They will not tell me why my wife loves me even when I am unlovable. They will not tell me why one painting reaches an understanding with my intellect and desire and why others leave me cold.

As an exclusive description of the world Scientism is a failure. It can only represent a reduction of our experience and an impoverishment of the human soul.

Scholasticism does not operate at the level of the natural sciences and therefore does not conflict with their findings, rather, it provides a rational way of speaking about the world that has never been superseded even though Descartes reduced the material world to undifferentiated extension and thus ditched the very useful Scholastic distinctions between substance and essence etc. David Hume prematurely announced that causation was a doubtful concept.

Reichenbach summaries Hume's argument thus:

1. Whatever is distinguishable can be conceived to be separate from each other.
2. The cause and effect are distinguishable.
3. Therefore, the cause and effect can be conceived to be separate from each other.
4. Whatever is conceivable is possible in reality.
5. Therefore, the cause and effect can be separate from each other in reality.

This argument effectively cuts the connection between cause and effect and subsequently we may expect all kinds of phenomena to appear at random. The error in Hume's argument is number 4. It is obviously not correct that anything we can conceive of or imagine is possible in reality, as my atheist detractors will correctly assert.

It seems that modern philosophers have wantonly desired to tear down all of the ancient wisdom. Surely Hume's obvious mistake in the above is a symptom of that. This is why many theologians spend their time finding out where it all went wrong and thus why we find ourselves in a metaphysical wasteland. For example, we have now no understanding of the nature of the good or the beautiful. This has led to much contemporary art being hollow posturing and our political life being reduced to the war of all against all.