Scientism and the Limitations of Scientific Inquiry

Historian of science Michael Ruse recently appeared in an interview for the New York Times to discuss the prompt, “Does Evolution Explain Religious Beliefs?” In the article, Ruse engaged with several deep issues – like the title suggests, evolution and religion while also the question of morality and its origin. While I disagree with his explanations on these various points, I cannot help but praise his rebuke of scientism and the polemic attacks by Richard Dawkins and Dawkin’s intellectual kin.

Because scientism runs rampant in academic society, it is important to understand its message and to weed out the metaphysical claims masked as scientific truths. Straightaway, Ruse denied that science could provide all the explanations needed to understand the existence and nature of the world. The types of questions science can ask, and ultimately answer, are limited by the very methodology science employs. Science can answer questions such as “What is the anatomy of an elephant? or “How do the planets revolve around the sun?” What it cannot answer are questions like Martin Heidegger’s “fundamental question of metaphysics”: Why is there something rather than nothing? A genuine question, though it may be, it simply does not fall under the purview of scientific inquiry.

This issue sounds abstract until we hear one of scientism’s most popular slogans: reliable knowledge is obtained solely through the scientific method. Sound familiar? Ironically, this claim is self-defeating, in that it itself cannot be scientifically proven. It is in fact, not even a claim of science; rather, it is a philosophical view about science. Thankfully, Michael Ruse, among others, have started to draw back the scope of science into its original domain, namely as one means among several others to determine truth (for example theological, philosophical, ethical, psychological, sociological, political, legal, economical, and historical ways of knowing). The scientific method gives us a disciplined way to examine the evidence of the physical world, but it cannot reasonably claim to be the source of all truth.

We must never forget that mistaken scientific paradigms do not float about in the sea of truth unmoored from fundamental metaphysical assumptions. Aristotle’s scientific theories flowed almost axiomatically from his prior philosophy. One may wonder what absurdities our age believes because of a fundamental error in our philosophies. Only time will tell.