Scientism and the Allure of Control

“Are you convinced now?” asks the Sphere of the Circle. “I am an infinite number of Circles… one placed on top of the other. When I cut through your plane, I make in your plane a section which you, very rightly, call a Circle” Imagine, he instructs, a 2-dimensional shape, moving “parallel to itself upward to comprise a solid.” 
"You mean northward," responds the Circle. For he cannot comprehend such a direction as “upward,” and proceeds to abuse the Sphere, “Madman! Irregular!” 

~ E. A. Abbott

Away from our workplaces, and especially in churches, we scientists often find ourselves alone. 

Yet an ideology now commonly called “scientism” has “a popular hold on the imagination,” according to Alister McGrath. On the popular level, much of the trouble began with the New Atheists, who wielded science into an “ism” after wrenching it from the death throes of positivism. These authors convinced many to buy into their claim that science is the only rational way of understanding reality. Away from popular non-fiction, fictional characters tout seemingly wise lines, like from Dana Scully: “what I find fantastic is any notion that there are answers beyond the realm of science.” 

The circularity of this view has been pointed out by many, even secular, philosophers and scientists. The only way to verify (and science is enamoured with verification) the claim that science is the only rational way of investigating reality is to somehow get ‘outside’ of science and obtain an overarching vantage point from where we can assess the relative rationality of science. But, as writes philosopher Edward Feser, “the very existence of that extra-scientific vantage point would falsify the claim that science alone gives us a rational means of investigating objective reality.”  

Science, I learnt the hard way when it left me flailing in quantum uncertainty, is fundamentally empirical: it observes nature. It cannot, in the words of the great scientific essayist Stephen Jay Gould, “adjudicate” on what might lie beyond what we observe. Nor can it, writes McGrath, determine “what the world ought to be like.” That quantum uncertainty exists or that objects fall under gravity in a predictable fashion is something we have learnt from observation, not by knowing beforehand that it must or will always be so. Epistemology cannot determine ontology, as McGrath succinctly argues. 

Yet scientism, like most plain language terms, is a slippery beast. A. C. Grayling, who is philosophically trained and might be thought of as a second wave New Atheist, claims to distinguish his views from scientism in the first few pages of his book The Frontiers of Knowledge. But two pages later he asserts that the question of whether there might be limits to our knowledge is “meaningless” because it is unanswerable, thus aligning himself with the positivists and scientismists and distancing himself from historical atheists. 

Even Bertrand Russell acknowledged unanswerable questions were worth asking. Grayling’s contention that we are in a “primitive stage” of science whose “frontier—so different from a boundary” may be one day crossed with the knowledge borne of our “best and most rigorously supported belief” clearly privileges science as the pre-eminent way of knowing and fits atheist philosopher Massimo Pigliucci’s definition of scientism as a “totalizing attitude that regards science as the ultimate standard and arbiter of all interesting questions.”

When weighing the truth claims of science vs religion, especially Christianity, I find the perplexing question is not why there are philosophical debates about the nature of knowledge and reality. It’s not even why the rise of naturalistic science cut a line between itself and the natural philosophy and Christian theology it had co-existed with for centuries. Of course there was going to be conflict where its findings and that of long held theological beliefs overlapped. 

The real conundrum is why science was eventually recognized by many as the ultimate arbiter of rational knowledge and became entrenched as such in the popular imagination. This has persisted beyond first-wave New Atheism in the works of current best-selling authors like Grayling and Yuval Noah Harari. 

This can’t just be a reaction against a poorly lived out Christianity that I suspect fuels at least some New Atheist positions, nor can it be boiled down to purely ethical objections (like the problem of evil) or traditional philosophical arguments that old-school atheists relied on. There is also something drastic going on with the perception of science, even amongst many scientists.

Rationality Makes Knowledge and Explains

What we know is what we deem rational. “The production of knowledge across culture and history” has been “characterized” by “criteria of rationality,” writes McGrath. And, indeed, rationality is the fulcrum on which the modern debates (if we are kind), or dismissive rants (if we are not) between science and religion turn. 

But whose rationality? Rationality was once thought to be the “proper functioning of human cognitive processes.” The problem is that “proper functioning of human cognitive processes” is not a singular thing universally understood in the same way. Rather, we find both across cultures and across time wildly different accounts of what “proper functioning” actually means. Just consider the differing beliefs held as “rational” by physicists in 2022 France, theologians in 1680 Geneva, or a lone woman in 1162 Australia. This problem is not just a question of intellectual progress. 

Even modern science has retreated from the idea of there being such a thing as the scientific method. Instead, “scientific methods” write McGrath, “emerge though scientific practice.” In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Scientific Objectivity, Julian Reiss and Jan Sprenger write that “good scientific reasoning cannot be captured by rational method.” Summarizing particularly the work of Paul Feyerabend, a philosopher of science, they go on to say, “no methodology whatsoever is able to capture the creative and often irrational ways by which science deepens our understanding of the world.” Indeed it was “just because he deliberately violated rules of scientific reasoning” that Galileo “managed to achieve groundbreaking scientific progress.” Science isn’t a plodding algorithmic approach to truth. Rather, McGrath writes, scientific theories often come in a “flash” of “insight.”

It’s hard to regard something as supremely rational when it resists being rationally categorized and employs irrational elements. 

Injecting a bit of philosophy of science into the science vs Christianity debates thus begins to subvert scientismic claims of science’s rational supremacy. In his project to map human rationality, especially that of science and theology, McGrath gives a thorough injection. Of particular import is his deep dive into the concept of “explanation.”

Explanation Comes in Many Forms

Quoting neuroscientist Steven Rose, McGrath outlines how when a frog jumps into a pond there are multiple explanations—or explanatory theories. All are “rational” in some sense. A physiologist may examine causality from the point of view of connection between the frog’s leg muscles and its brain. A biochemist will focus on organic chemistry, including that of the frog’s muscles that trigger the jump. An animal behaviourist explains the frog jumped to escape a snake. The latter is of particular interest as it is an example of top-down rational explanation. So often, science is viewed as only a bottom-up, reductionistic source of explanation: the parts explain the whole. 

But unification, McGrath reminds us, has also “played an important role in the development of the natural sciences” as a form of explanation. When Isaac Newton explained how planetary movement and the terrestrial tendency of objects to fall were due to the same phenomena of gravity that was explanation via unification. It was not a purely deductive process from first principles, like a mathematical theorem, that led to proving the existence of an entity called gravity. Such explanations are a “top-down” result of collecting observations of the world and looking for patterns and extending this collection of finite observations to a general theory. The observations are the evidence for the theory as are any correct predictions the theory makes. 

Recognition of the importance of unification then opens the door to similar explanations in other knowledge systems. Christianity, writes McGrath, also offers a unifying “explanatory framework.” Lewis’s famous argument from desire is an example, proposing God as the explanation for why we have desires which nothing finite can satisfy. Going back ten centuries, McGrath also argues that Aquinas’s ‘Five Ways’ and other ancient arguments commonly classified as proofs for God’s existence should more accurately be seen as affirmations of “the fundamental rationality of Christian belief” that, for Aquinas at least, unified his human experience and provided an “explanation of various aspects of our experience of the world,” such as goodness and beauty. The evidence for the explanation is our experience. Of course, Christianity or, indeed, any religion, is not reducible purely to its explanatory or rational elements. But these elements of faith are vital and also a lifeline for the scientifically minded. 

But Science is Better

The New Atheists stop the conversation here. Theology, or any sort of Christian apologism, is excluded from discussions of rationality because they are deemed irrational from the outset. Their influence is widespread. A 2017 survey of non-religious Australians found 47% “prefer a scientific and rational, ‘evidence-based’ approach to life,” implicitly ruling religion as incompatible with such an approach. In the United States, a 2015 Pew Research Centre Survey found 59% of Americans hold that science and religion are in conflict, with nearly a quarter giving reasons related to rationality and perceptions of “facts vs. beliefs.” Personal discussions across a broad spectrum of professions, faiths and educational backgrounds over many years reveals similar dichotomous views of science and faith.

In a way, I get it. I didn’t for a long time share McGrath’s view that “it is the Christian vision of reality as a whole—rather than any of its individual components—that proves rationally compelling.” That Christianity shares explanatory methods with science doesn’t automatically make Christianity rationally compelling. Combined with unfortunate early encounters with Christians unwilling to engage with Christianity’s rationality but who instead pushed me to just “feel” and “believe,” I dismissed the explanatory claims of Christianity as weak at best, cruel at worst. They lack science’s massive theoretical framework scaffolded around repeatable observational evidence and mathematical language that my certainty-seeking post-Enlightenment analytical mind desired. Science was just more rational. But I’ve since wondered: Did I just mean more controllable? Hold that thought. 

You will be hard pressed to find a thorough definition of what qualifies as rational in most New Atheist texts that usually tend toward the polemical. In a way, that’s understandable. Even McGrath acknowledges that “rationality has proved remarkably resistant to clarification.” Grayling makes an attempt. Rationality, he writes in The God Argument has the “primary mark” of “reliance on evidence, taking relevant experience seriously, and using associated knowledge and theory appropriately.” I’m reminded of the meme about how the word “reasonable”  holds up the western legal framework but will cut him some slack given that such fuzziness is inevitable in language. 

Grayling goes on to say, “to be rational about beliefs means ‘proportioning the evidence or grounds one has for holding that belief to the belief itself.’” Science is the shining example. He frequently links science with “common sense” that will be our “deliverance” from “irrational” religious claims. The rational and naturalistic worldview is one where “what exists is the realm of nature, describable by natural laws” which is accordingly “premised on observation, reason and science, and excludes any kind of faith-involving element. He goes on to argue that religious apologist arguments are not rational because they “only make sense to anyone who has accepted the premises and parameters of the belief system already.”

Taking Grayling’s views as representative of the scientism movement, we see that the elevation of science and simultaneous denigration of religion rests on three related bases: derivation from evidence leading to warranted belief, the “common sense” and obvious existence of the natural world that we can observe and reason about, and the absence of a parochial and limiting system. 

Slippery Photons and the Failure of Complete Objectivity

To the first criteria—where does the evidence lead: This was a question physicists in the 1920s were angsting over. Fresh from the upending of seemingly common sense notions of Euclidean space independent of time by Einstein’s theories of relativity, they were now faced with perplexing results from experiments investigating the structure of atoms and light. “Can nature possibly be as absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?” Werner Heisenberg, co-developer of Quantum Physics, asked himself one evening in near despair.

One of the experiments he was talking about was the famous double slit experiment. First performed in the 19th century, light is shone through two very narrow slits and then collected on a screen. 

According to the wave theory of light (that started with Christiaan Huygens in 1687 and explained experiments just like this one) the waves will diffract on passing through the slits then interfere at the screen, like ocean waves colliding, sometimes re-enforcing each other and sometimes cancelling out each other, producing a series of bright and dark bands. According to the particle theory of light (that started with Albert Einstein in 1905 and explained, for example, the photoelectric effect), each particle, or photon, of light would go through one slit or the other, like a car through a tunnel, and just two light bands would form on the screen, directly opposite the slits. 

On performing the experiment, the wave nature of light seems obvious with the appearance of the interference pattern. Yet scientists in the 1920s, noted that the light was also behaving like a particle as it was collected at the screen in a series of blips. Which was it? Was light a particle or a wave? A particle always has a path. So then, we must be able to determine which slit each photon passed through on its path to the screen. But if a detector was placed at either of the slits to determine which one the photon had passed through, the interference pattern would disappear, and the two bands of light opposite the slit consistent with the particle picture would instead appear. 

Whether light behaved as a particle or a wave thus depended on the measurement and, if a particle, its path could not be determined. We cannot, in Heisenberg’s words, “objectify” the light photon. (This is the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, but other interpretations are just as upending.) Similar experiments have been done with electrons. The common sense idea of local realism, of bits of matter in certain places at certain times—the particle “must have been somewhere between two observations,” surely—was thus challenged. 

For Heisenberg, as he relates in his highly lucid 1959 book, Physics and Philosophy, the extreme difficulty he and other physicists had in accepting the these results arose because the science of classical physics had “started from the belief—or should one say from the illusion?—that we could describe the world or at least parts of the world without any reference to ourselves.”

Newton, that ubiquitous founder of modern science in the popular imagination had “left the impression that there were no assumptions in his physics which were not necessitated by the experimental data” wrote F. S. C. Northrop when introducing Heisenberg’s work. Instead, Newton claimed he had “deduced his basic concepts and laws from the experimental findings” in a way that would make the New Atheists proud. But there were assumptions. Newton had, most tellingly for Heisenberg, assumed objects exist in Euclidean space independent of observation, and set modern physics off on a path where it had “accepted the premises and parameters of the belief system already.” In other words, one of history’s greatest scientists went directly against our third Grayling criteria without even realising he had done so. The natural world is out there for us to discover and observe objectively. Obviously.

Objectivity, our second Grayling criteria, is a necessary assumption for science. We must believe that there are statements about and phenomena in the world whose content does not depend on whether and how they are being observed, and it is sensible, for example, to live each day assuming tables and chairs are there even if we aren’t looking. But just because some statements or parts of the world can be objectively identified in this way, it does not follow that they all can. The assumption that “the direct 'actuality' of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range” is false, warned Heisenberg. The atomic range where quantum effects are most pronounced may seem far removed from everyday experience, but it is just these realms, of unusual and ineffable experience, of consciousness, of elusive meaning, that scientism wants to claim.

The Road from Evidence to Scientific Knowledge is not Straight

There is no arrogant suggestion from Heisenberg or most physicists today that Quantum Mechanics is a final theory. Here they agree with New Atheist claims that science will keep expanding with new theories and new insights. But Quantum Mechanics’s role in exposing and overturning seemingly self-evident assumptions about how we look at the world and how we do science is a warning of how we can’t always immediately recognize the limitations of our scientific concepts.

Quantum Mechanics has been a remarkably successful theory, making predictions and explaining phenomena to high accuracy. But so did Newtonian Mechanics for two centuries until Quantum Mechanics and relativity came along as more complete theories that reduced to Newtonian values in the realms of everyday experience of large objects and small speeds. This exposes at least in transitory form another concern in the philosophy of science: the underdetermination of theory by evidence. More than one theory can explain the same data. “In other words,” write Julian Reiss and Jan Sprenger, “there is a gap between the evidence and the theory supported by it.”

In getting to new theories it is wise, as Grayling asserts, to have evidence for what we believe, for what we hold as knowledge. But how observations and evidence feed into theory and intertwine to make knowledge is not straightforward. Aside from flashes of irrational insight, imperfect objectivity, and underdetermination of theory by evidence, observations are entangled with the theories they confirm. When measuring temperature, for example, you use a thermometer, which operates by assuming temperature causes an expansion or contraction of material in the thermometer. The reading or observation is thus entangled with the theory that explains how temperature causes expansion and contraction. This entanglement, and indeed the gap between theory and evidence, doesn’t mean science is useless or wrong. But it does mean, as Thomas Kuhn postulated, that science is a “web of belief” rather than a logical train. 

Leading an evidence based life is not straightforward.

We Want Control, but Are Stuck in the Science System

What science does that, for example, theology does not is yield to our control. This is, I think, the real charm that has led to its elevation to the ultimate way of knowing in the minds of so many. 

Verifiable, repeatable experience, such as the results of a scientific experiment, feels safe. We don’t need to become entangled in questions of whether our spiritual experiences or those of others—experiences that cannot be summoned at will and tested in a scientific environment—are actually real. (Yet this is also where we need to be careful; we have not experienced or seen blackholes or quarks, but the repeatability of experiments that give evidence for their existence makes them seem more trustworthy than the uncontrollable “evidence/experience” of people who have, for example, had non-scientifically explainable experiences.)

Our control of scientific experimentation and the knowledge it offers, combined with the assumption that there are no assumptions in science, instils an undeniable authority into scientific practice and also into us, as its wielders. 

The historian of science, Steven Shapin, has written well on the turn in 20th century science from contemplation to pragmatism. As technology and broadscale publicly funded scientific institutions rose, scientific goals became focused not just on understanding nature, but on how we could use and control it. But the allure of authority goes deeper. We were not just using science to control nature but using our control of scientific experiment to define what nature was, subconsciously or not. Anything not scientifically understood or verifiable was not real, and thus we stayed in control. 

The problem, as Heisenberg realised, was that classical science, based on classical physics and its “fundamental concepts” of “space, time, matter and causality” was a framework “so narrow and rigid that it was difficult to find a place in it for many concepts of our language that had always belonged to its very substance.” For instance, how can someone operating within the confines of this classical science make sense of “mind, of the human soul or of life”? Religion now seemed “only imaginary.” Science may have been instigated as the new reality, yet how were we and how are we to marry this with the fact that “our existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality”?

Grayling, to his credit, also engages with our limited scientific concepts, referring to it as the “pinhole problem” whereby “we exist in a very narrow band” of slow speeds and large objects. This classical world seems so obvious and is therefore “very hard to escape.” We form our classical concepts from everyday experience, but these concepts don’t always apply in the far reaches of reality. 

Grayling writes:  

the cognitive architecture of our thought imposes conceptions of order, causality, linearity, consistency, monotonicity, uniformity, predictability, and so on, which are as useful to conceptualizing quantum phenomena as it would be to apply dog-grooming techniques to solving quadratic equations.

We are, writes Grayling, just not configured to “naturally” think in certain ways; for instance, quantum mechanically. But, we are, writes Grayling “able to think that way mathematically.” 

The way out of our conceptual cage for Grayling is thus mathematics. Mathematics becomes its own justifier, better than the natural language at explaining the world, and we should rely on it to probe into the remote parts of nature and experience. Mathematics, Grayling claims, will one day draw the noumenal out of the pinhole and make it phenomenal: it was just electricity, not a ghost.

Maybe. Scientific discovery will no doubt continue, aided by mathematics, but there’s no scientific reason to believe its remit will ever be complete nor that it is the only rational way to comprehend our world. We have no scientific basis to assume we will one day be Spheres, looking down smugly at a complete model of the reality of which we are embedded. 

Besides, I often find mathematics gives people a false sense of certainty. Not because it is axiomatic—to dismiss those axioms would be to dismiss the basis for human reasoning—but because the way mathematics encodes reality in science is not perfect. We must make approximations whenever constructing a mathematical model of the world. Mathematics, within its own system, proves results. But when used to construct a mathematical model of the world, we have, writes Heisenberg, “idealized” that world. At University, our physics class had a joke that began: “I can prove the existence of God. First, assume God is a sphere…” “Thinking mathematically,” as Grayling posits, only embeds us further in a system (that of mathematical science) that is somewhat detached from aspects of the “real world.” 

For Heisenberg, the way out of the cage is not mathematics but instead ordinary language. For even though its terms may be “not very well defined,” its concepts are “formed by the immediate connection with reality” in a way that hyper precise and “idealized” mathematical scientific language is not. And although ordinary language and its concepts are what led us into the limitations of classical physics in the first place, this occurred precisely when we started to try to exactly codify that language into mathematical and logical terms, thus rendering it smaller than the reality it was trying to represent. Ordinary language and the realms of art and religion in which it is used to represent and comprehend the “interplay between the world and ourselves” should not, says Heisenberg, be discarded.

Christians Often Consolidate the Divide

Thus faced with the repressed metaphysical assumptions of inflated science, a recovering adherent of scientism might start to look outside the science system and examine Christianity more closely. When they do, I fear they may, like I was, be swiftly repelled by encountering that subset of Christians that espouse irrationality as a virtue. For them, “it is more spiritual,” writes Roger Olson “to believe against logic and evidence than to believe with them.” Thus we have found antiscientism. 

Here, non-Christian knowledge is not just unwelcome, but, in McGrath’s words, a “category violation,” a clearly implicit claim to the completeness and ultimacy of Christian knowledge. Yet, while God may be ultimate, our knowledge of him is not. Scientists are not Spheres and neither are Christians. 

For someone who loves science, who does not see explaining the geometry and cause of crepuscular rays as taking away from their beauty (as I have been told it does), antiscientism makes them have to “choose between being a Christian and being a scientist,” a false dichotomy not dictated by science or by the scriptures. The latter rather command us to “test everything; hold fast what is good,” ie: to use our God-given rational minds. 

Rationality Roulette

The problem we return to when using rationality as a lever into science-Christianity complementarianism is of ranking. Often, science and Christianity are not, as McGrath summarizes, “competing for the same explanatory territory.” Science is better at questions of function while religion and art speak more often to value and purpose. 

Yet science can seep into commenting on value and purpose. In constructing our theories, including scientific ones, we inherently inject values into what we examine and how we can examine it, as Heisenberg so eloquently reminded us with assumed objectivity. I think also of the medical model of the human as a biomedical machine. This assumption can overlook and implicitly render less important poorly understood mental and spiritual sickness. If you are mentally ill, do you take medicine, take psychiatric therapy or pray? With no agreement on such epistemological boundaries, it seems we have slipped into a sub-form of relativism where we must decide the boundary ourselves. McGrath acknowledges that ‘consilience’ is the hardest part of the discussion—that

[w]hat remains stubbornly elusive is their [rationalities] failure to provide means of calibrating their respective reliability or to offer a theoretical framework that allows the settling of boundary disputes.

This sub-relativism held me back from Christianity for years. It is hard to relinquish the control of an overarching view. Yet the voyage through a history of physics with Heisenberg and McGrath does still help navigate the “stormy story sea of reality claims.”

Any assertion that science is the only rational system is a metaphysical claim, not a scientific one and certainly not an obvious or inevitable endpoint of examination of evidence, or at least it isn’t unless you’re someone who has accepted the premises and parameters of the scientism belief system already.