Refuting Scientism

Knowledge is a light that God places into the heart of whomever He wills
Prophet Muhammad [s]

I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have... blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to ourselves - that we have first raised a dust, and then complain we cannot see
George Berkeley

Scientism and Rationality

I will begin by addressing the broad question of the rationality of faith.  I suspect that for most believers, Imaan exists because it just seems to them that God exists, just like it seems to them that the Sun is bright, that they are not dreaming, and that justice is a moral virtue.  When asked by atheists why they believe, they talk about the Fitra, the innate knowledge in our hearts of the existence of God and of religious truths.  Typically, the atheists aren’t satisfied by this reply:  ‘That’s just faith’, they proclaim, ‘Where’s the scientific evidence!?’

By ‘faith’, the atheists typically means ‘unjustified belief’, and so in describing belief in God as ‘faith’ they are claiming that it is unjustified.  Why is it unjustified?  The answer is given by the second half of the atheists’ reply: there is no scientific evidence to support it.  Implicit in this reply is the claim that any belief without evidence is unjustified and so irrational.  The reason that belief in God without evidence is irrational is because there is no evidence for God, say the atheists.  This is the central claim:

1.  In order for any belief to be rational it has to be based on scientific evidence.

This claim goes by the name of ‘Scientism’.  I will argue that Scientism is false.  But before I do, I should make it clear that I do think there are many good arguments for the existence of God.  There is certainly much evidence out there (or ‘signs’ in the language of the Qur’an), it just isn’t necessary to know about that evidence in order to be rational.  The fitra is sufficient.

Against Scientism

The argument against scientism has two parts.  The first is to show that there are no good reasons for accepting it, and the second is to show that there are good reasons to reject it.

What is responsible for the widespread acceptance of scientism?  Arguably, the success of science has played the biggest part.  Scientific advances have cured diseases, allowed us to peer into the deepest oceans, and look back in time to the beginning of the universe.  We have built sky scrapers and space rockets, made computers and mobile phones.  The advocate of scientism will point to the extraordinary success of science, and argue from that success that science is the only source of knowledge, and so the only guide to what exists; absence any scientific evidence, any belief is unjustified.

There can be no question that science has been hugely successful in telling us about the physical world.  The believer is happy to concede this, and point out that in fact many of the pioneers of science were theists who were inspired to do science by their faith in God.  What the believer is not willing to concede is that this proves that science is the only source of knowledge, for the move from the premise that science is successful to the conclusion that there is only scientific knowledge and not any other type of knowledge is plainly invalid.   The success of science proves only that science is successful, not that it’s the only source of knowledge.  Science is good at giving us mathematical models of things, and telling us about the material workings of the physical world.  When it comes to other domains of inquiry that aren’t concerned with physical matter, then science tells us very little.  It would be like arguing that because a metal detector is so good at detecting metal, then it’s good at detecting any object whatsoever.  This plainly doesn’t follow, and assumes without argument that all objects are metal objects.  So the argument for scientism is flawed.

Let us turn to the argument against scientism.  Ironically, scientism is self refuting.  Recall that scientism (claim 1 above) labels all beliefs not based on scientific evidence as irrational.  But for those who accept it, scientism is itself a belief.  So we can ask:  What is the scientific evidence for scientism?  What is the evidence that science is the only source of knowledge?  Please point me to a lab experiment that shows this, or to a randomised control trial, or a peer reviewed scientific paper.  The truth is that no amount of gazing through telescopes or looking down microscopes will prove that claim 1 is true, for scientism is not a scientific theory but a philosophical one.  It is a claim about what we can know, and so falls within the philosophical discipline of epistemology.  This poses a problem for the advocate of scientism, for if there is no scientific evidence that proves scientism true, then it must be irrational, for scientism itself states that in order for a belief to be rational it has to be based on scientific evidence.  Scientism pulls the rug from under its own feet.  It’s bad epistemology.

You might think that the above considerations are bad enough for scientism, but it doesn’t stop there.  If scientism is true, then we’re all irrational, including those atheists who naively accept it.  The following is a brief and incomplete list of facts that aren’t known through science, yet every sane person believes.

1.  Moral truths, e.g. justice is good, torturing innocent people for fun is wrong

Science tells us how things work, but not how we should act.  We can learn all there is to know about the human body, and still not know how to act morally.  As philosophers are fond of saying:  ‘Is’ doesn’t imply ‘ought’.  Knowledge that sticking a knife into someone will harm them doesn’t allow us to infer that that act is evil.

2.  The external world exists, i.e. I’m not hallucinating or dreaming

If we were dreaming then the world would look the same as it does now, so no scientific experiment can prove that we aren’t dreaming.  Or to take the philosophers favourite example, for all we scientifically know, we could be brains in vats being stimulated by mad scientists.  The sense perceptions would be the same; we would think that we were conducting scientific experiments, but it would all be an illusion.  Having said that, clearly we aren’t hallucinating (who can seriously think otherwise?), so scientism must be false, as it’s not through science that we know this.

3.  Induction is a rational means of forming beliefs

The scientific method depends on induction.  An example would be inferring that all humans have brains from a limited set of observations of humans.  We haven’t peered into the skulls of all humans, but we’ve looked into enough of them to be justified in inferring that all humans have brains.  The problems for atheists is that induction can’t be given a non-circular justification, as Hume famously pointed in the 18th Century.  Induction depends on the uniformity of nature; it presupposes that the future will resemble the past.  That’s why observations in the past that humans have brains allow us to infer that they still have brains today, and will continue to do tomorrow.  Unfortunately, there is no non-circular justification of the uniformity of nature.  It might be tempting to argue that because nature has been uniform in the past, it will continue to be in the future, but such an argument will be using the principle of induction, and as induction itself presupposes the uniformity of nature, the argument would be a circular one.

4.  The Laws of logic

Science wouldn’t be possible without the laws of logic.  All scientific theorising depends on them, and presupposes their applicability.  The laws of logic come before science, so they cannot depend on science for their justification; rather, they are known to be true intuitively.