Cringey Stuff I Used to Say About Science

Sometimes I think back on the conversations I had when I was an agnostic. Conversations with other Christians … and I just cringe.

I remember saying to this one fella, “science is the only way we can come to know what is true.” Dear goodness. Just remembering this interaction makes me wince. If that bloke had of simply asked me, “what do you mean by science?” I would have melted into a puddle. I had no idea. It’s just what smart, serious, non-superstitious people said, wasn’t it?

If he had of asked me that I probably would have just said, “it’s the only way we can arrive at truth,” not at all realizing that I would have been begging the question.

Unfortunately this bloke wasn’t much of a philosopher and so didn’t give me any push back. I walked away from that conversation feeling pretty bloody good about myself.

So, how should of he responded. Well, what’s science? Let’s start there. Science comes from the latin scientia meaning knowledge. Back in Aristotle’s day it meant the same thing as philosophy. Today when people speak of science they’re talking about a method of investigation used to discover truths about the natural world. It has a limited scope of what it can, in theory, come to know. If you’re using science to try to directly discover the existence of God, you’re going to be unsuccessful, not because God doesn’t exist, but because you’re using the wrong tool.

It would be a bit like searching the beach for diamonds with a metal detector. Metal detectors can’t detect the presence of diamonds and science, which is limited to the natural world, cannot detect the presence of anything beyond it.

Evolutionary biologist and atheist Steven Jay Gould sums it up nicely:

“To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth million time... science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists.”

True science recognizes the limits of its sphere of knowledge.

The view that science can or should provide the answer to every question is not true science, but a perversion of science called scientism. Scientism claims that we shouldn’t accept as true anything that can’t be proven scientifically, which is what I was doing in that aforementioned conversation.

Yet there are many things science can’t prove.

Science can’t prove the laws of logic or mathematical truths; it presupposes them. It can’t prove metaphysical truths, such as the reality of the external world, or that the universe didn’t simply spring into existence five minutes ago with the appearance of age—including our memories of a past that never happened. Those are rational beliefs, but they can’t be established by scientific experiment.

Nor can science prove morality.

Science can’t show that we have a duty to help a starving child, or that Nazi concentration camps were evil. It can describe what happened in those camps. It can explain the psychological effects on victims and perpetrators. It can even speculate about the evolutionary origins of our moral intuitions. But it cannot tell us that those acts were objectively evil. Good and evil are not material entities that can be measured in a laboratory. Their existence and nature lie beyond what science, by itself, can establish.

Finally, if scientism were true, then it ought to be scientifically provable, right? And this is what this fella should have said to me. He should have asked me, “do you think that science is the only way to arrive at truth?” And when I said yes, which I undoubtedly would of, he should have asked me what scientific experiment did I run or would I appeal to to justify that truth. And then he should have laughed as I turned into a puddle.

Bottom line? The claim, “You shouldn’t believe anything unless it’s proven by science,” is not a scientific claim. It’s a philosophical one. More specifically, it’s a value judgment about what people ought to believe. In other words, it belongs to ethics—the very realm scientism cannot justify using science alone.

Scientism, then, is not merely false.

It’s self-refuting.

Take that 15 year old, Matt Fradd.