I’m certainly not arguing that art is worthless. Far from it. I derive immense satisfaction from books and paintings. But I appreciate them for their emotional resonance, for the depiction of other points of view, and for sheer aesthetics. Despite all this, I argue that art cannot ascertain truth or knowledge of the universe, simply because it lacks the tools for such inquiry. Insofar as art conveys knowledge, that comes from empirical observation and not through the artist’s revelations, which, like the revelations of religious believers, tell us about the artist herself rather than the realities beyond her mind. Perhaps it’s best to see art not as a way of knowing, but as a way of feeling, of giving us access to sumptuous beauty, personal validation, and, as with Buddhist meditation, a sense of solidarity and unity with others and the universe as a whole. Art intensifies and expands our subjective experience, and it’s none the worse for that. And by stimulating our emotions and curiosity, it can be a tool, prompting us to search for real, verified knowledge.
When drawn from everyday life, such subjective experience serves as the last resort for adherents to the other-ways-of-knowing argument. The classic version, which I often hear from believers, is this: “I know my wife loves me”—supposedly a claim of knowledge beyond the ken of science. Like religious “truths,” this assertion is said to be based on faith. Of course, someday science may indeed study love by measuring neurological activity or one’s titer of hormones, and by correlating these things with one’s claimed emotions, but until that day there’s another scientific method: observation of behavior. As one of the commenters on my Web site argued:
We know the ways in which humans express romantic interest and/or love, and when we want to know if someone likes or loves us, we do so by inferring from his/her behavior.
What are teenage girls doing when they huddle around, dissecting how a particular boy is acting with a girl who is interested in him? They endlessly discuss all the clues, all the evidence in his behavior that suggests he is romantically interested . . . or not. My wife spends lots of time talking to her single friends. “Did he call you back the next day? Did he tell you he was going on that trip? Did he ask you to come?” etc. . . . all an analysis of the available observations looking for evidence of romantic feelings.
Why is it we think a guy—“Bill”—has a screw loose who turns up at a TV station with flowers ready to propose marriage to a pretty news anchorwoman who has never met him?
What about if “Susan” just went up to a guy on the street she’d never met, assuming the guy loves her and would immediately marry her?
What is the difference in these scenarios that mark them as “nut-case, irrational actions” vs. normal, loving relationship scenarios? It’s that Bill and Susan are operating under a total lack of evidence for their belief that these people love them. So in direct contradiction to the claims of the religious apologist, we recognize mere “faith based” inferences of love as irrational, false, and non-indicative of how normal people conclude someone loves them.
“I’m hungry,” my friend tells me, and that too is seen as extrascientific knowledge. And indeed, any feeling that you have, any notion or revelation, can be seen as subjective truth or knowledge. What that means is that it’s true that you feel that way. What that doesn’t mean is that the epistemic content of your feeling is true. That requires independent verification by others. Often someone claiming hunger actually eats very little, giving rise to the bromide “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.”
Which brings us to religion. In a way, this discussion has been a digression, for until now it has skirted the real issue: the ability of religion to find truth. The reason believers argue for “other ways of knowing” is simply to show that science has no monopoly on finding truth, and therefore that religion might muscle in alongside archaeology and history. But as we’ve seen, insofar as archaeology, economics, sociology, and history produce knowledge, they do so by using the methods of science broadly construed: verifiable, tested, and generally agreed-upon results of empirical study.
But even construing science broadly, one can’t stretch it far enough to encompass religion. For even the most elastic notion of science doesn’t include the methods that supposedly allow religion to gain knowledge: unverifiable authority of ancient books, faith, subjective experience, and personal revelation. As William James argued, it is the subjective and revelatory aspect of religion that gives it the most purchase: the feeling of certainty that religious claims are true. But when one has a religious experience, what is “true” is only that one has had that experience, not that its contents convey anything about reality. To determine that, one needs a way to verify the contents of a revelation, and that means science. After all, while some Christians accept the existence of Jesus because they have mental conversations with him, Hindus have mental conversations with Shiva, and Muslims with Allah. All the revelations in all the world’s scriptures have never told us that a molecule of benzene has six carbon atoms arranged in a ring, or that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. It is this asymmetry of knowledge that, despite religion’s truth claims, makes its adherents embrace the fallacious claim that religion and science occupy separate magisteria.
The Scientism Canard
The other-ways-of-knowing claim is often coupled with accusations of “scientism”: a behavior in which science or its practitioners are said to overstep their boundaries. Scientism is seen as an intrusion of science where it doesn’t belong, an unwarranted invasion of philosophy, the humanities, ethics, and even theology. These are examples of what Stephen Jay Gould, in his NOMA argument, called the boundary violations of science. How dare, the critics say, science tell us anything about morality or aesthetics?
When we examine the behaviors described as “scientism,” they’re diverse and often unrelated. The physicist Ian Hutchinson sees it as an attempt to apply scientific methods to disciplines in which they’re useless, trying to answer the “big questions” supposedly reserved for theology:
It is not merely the misapplication of techniques such as quantification to questions where numbers have nothing to say; not merely the confusion of the material and social realms of human experience; not merely the claim of social researchers to be applying the aims and procedures of natural science to the human world. Scientism is all of these, but something profoundly more. It is the desperate hope, and wish, and ultimately the illusory belief that some standardized set of procedures called “science” can provide us with an unimpeachable source of moral authority, a suprahuman basis for answers to questions like “What is life, and when, and why?”
The philosopher Susan Haack, on the other hand, sees scientism as science refusing to recognize its own limits, along with the problems this causes:
What I meant by “scientism” was . . . a kind of over-enthusiastic and uncritically deferential attitude towards science, an inability to see or an unwillingness to acknowledge its fallibility, its limitations, and its potential dangers.
Finally, the physician and bioethics expert Leon Kass characterizes scientism as the attempt to replace religion—and everything else—with science, a strategy that, he claims, could rend the very fabric of Western society:
But beneath the weighty ethical concerns raised by these new biotechnologies—a subject for a different lecture—lies a deeper philosophical challenge: one that threatens how we think about who and what we are. Scientific ideas and discoveries about living nature and man, perfectly welcome and harmless in themselves, are being enlisted to do battle against our traditional religious and moral teachings, and even our self-understanding as creatures with freedom and dignity. A quasi-religious faith has sprung up among us—let me call it “soul-less scientism”—which believes that our new biology, eliminating all mystery, can give a complete account of human life, giving purely scientific explanations of human thought, love, creativity, moral judgment, and even why we believe in God. . . . Make no mistake. The stakes in this contest
are high: at issue are the moral and spiritual health of our nation, the continued vitality of science, and our own self-understanding as human beings and as children of the West.
The diverse notions of scientism have only one thing in common: they’re all pejorative. In fact, the entry on “scientism” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy begins:
“Scientism” is a term of abuse. Therefore, perhaps inevitably, there is no one simple characterization of the views of those who are thought to be identified as prone to it.
And ends like this:
A successful accusation of scientism usually relies upon a restrictive conception of the sciences and an optimistic conception of the arts as hitherto practiced. Nobody espouses scientism; it is just detected in the writings of others.
But dire warnings like those of Kass are exaggerated. The dangers of scientism, no matter how you define it, are virtually nonexistent. To examine these supposed dangers, let’s group the definitions into a few discrete categories. “Scientism” usually denotes one or more of the following four claims. First, science is the sole source of reliable facts about the universe; that is, it is the only reliable “way of knowing.” Alternatively, scientism could mean that the humanities should be subsumed under the rubric of science. That is, areas like history, archaeology, politics, morality, art, and music should be viewed only through a scientific lens, and when possible should adopt the methods of science. Scientism could also refer to the idea that questions that can’t be answered by science aren’t worth considering or discussing. Such questions include those involving morality, ways to live, beauty, emotions, and, of course, religion. The most damning definition of scientism is the idea that scientists are arrogant, lack humility, and are reluctant to admit that their findings might be wrong.
As for the first claim, I’ve argued that science, construed broadly as a commitment to the use of rationality, empirical observation, testability, and falsifiability, is indeed the only way to gain objective knowledge (as opposed to subjective knowledge) about the universe. I’ve also argued that disciplines not normally considered “science” (like economics and sociology) can also produce knowledge when they use the methods of science. Finally, mathematics and philosophy produce a more restricted kind of knowledge: the logical results of assuming a set of axioms or principles. In the first sense of the term, then, most of my colleagues and I are indeed guilty of scientism. But in that sense scientism is a virtue—the virtue of holding convictions with a tenacity proportional to the evidence supporting them.
A few academics like Edward O. Wilson and Alex Rosenberg have indeed argued that eventually all areas of inquiry, including the humanities, will be not only united with science, but subsumed by it. The philosopher Julian Baggini argues for the futility of this takeover: “History, for example, may ultimately depend on nothing more than the movement of atoms, but you cannot understand the battle of Hastings by examining interactions of fermions and bosons.”
This accusation is unfair. I’ve never heard a scientist claim that a knowledge of particle physics could give us insight into history. (Of course, many of us feel that if we had the unattainable perfect knowledge of every particle in the universe, we could in principle explain such macroscopic events.) A far more common claim is that many areas of the humanities, including politics, sociology, and literary scholarship, could be improved by insights from evolutionary biology and neuroscience. And really, who could disagree? Is there no room for empirical investigation in any of these areas—no way, for instance, that we could gain insights into human psychology by seeing it as partly a product of natural selection?
Indeed, archaeology, history, and sociology—even biblical scholarship—are increasingly informed by modern science. In a vigorous defense of that trend, Steven Pinker describes many other areas that have benefited from more rigorous, science-oriented approaches: evolutionary psychology is now a valid branch of psychology, articles in linguistics journals rely more on rigorous methodological inquiry, and data science promises to extract new information from economics, politics, and history. Naturally, some of the applications of science to these fields will be poorly motivated or executed, but that’s not a problem of science itself, only of its misapplication. Presumably humanities scholars, like scientists, can recognize bad experimental design, flawed data analysis, or unsupported conclusions. And I’m certain that nearly all scientists agree with Pinker that our hope to help our colleagues in the humanities “is not an imperialistic drive to occupy the humanities; the promise of science is to enrich and diversify the intellectual tools of humanistic scholarship, not to obliterate them.”
As for the claim that only scientific questions are worth discussing, I’ve met hundreds of scientists in my career, and I’ve never heard one say anything like that. Like all people, scientists can be arrogant and overbearing about their work, but so can novelists, artists, and historians! Nevertheless, more questions than we think can be informed by science, including those involving history, politics, the source of artworks, and issues of morality. After all, if you support the death penalty because you think it’s a deterrent, or that certain offenders can never be rehabilitated, those opinions can be supported—or derailed—by empirical observation.
As we learn more about ourselves from evolution, psychology, and the neurosciences, more and more of the humanities become open to scientific study. Ian Hutchinson misses an important point when he judges beauty and emotionality as off-limits to science (accusations of scientism, of course, often come from the faithful):
Consider the beauty of a sunset, the justice of a verdict, the compassion of a nurse, the drama of a play, the depth of a poem, the terror of a war, the excitement of a symphony, the significance of a history, the love of a woman. Which of these can be reduced to the clarity of a scientific description? . . . This is not a problem for science. It simply means that science is not able to deal with topics like these.
Not so fast. I’m confident that, someday, studies of neurology, genetics, and cognition will help us understand why some works of art move us and others don’t, why some people are compassionate and others not, and why we see sunsets and waterfalls as beautiful but are repelled by wastelands. It’s common to hear that love is a matter of “chemistry,” but that’s not just a metaphor, for surely the intense emotions that accompany love—sometimes verging on psychosis—are amenable to scientific analysis. Someday, for instance, we may be able to gauge the intensity (or even the presence) of love using neurology and biochemistry. That day may be decades away, but I’m not only sure that it will come, but just as sure that it won’t stop poets and composers from writing paeans to love.
Like moral questions, there are many issues worth discussing that ultimately come down to matters of preference. How should I balance work versus play? Who was a better painter, Turner or Van Gogh? To which journal should I send my latest paper? I discuss things like these all the time with my fellow scientists. The notion that we disdain such questions is nonsense; even though we know there are no objective answers, we still might learn something.
Scientism is in fact a mug’s game, a grab bag of disparate accusations that are mostly inaccurate or overblown. Nearly all articles criticizing scientism not only fail to convince us that it’s dangerous, but don’t even give any good examples of it. In the end, as Daniel Dennett argues, scientism “is a completely undefined term. It just means science that you don’t like.” Why don’t people like it? Some in the humanities fear (without justification, I think) that science will render their disciplines passé, while religious believers labor under the misapprehension that tearing down science will somehow elevate religion.
Given its diverse meanings and lack of specificity, the word “scientism” should be dropped. But if it’s to be kept, I suggest we level the playing field by introducing the term religionism, which I’ll define as “the tendency of religion to overstep its boundaries by making unwarranted statements a
bout the universe, or by demanding unearned authority.” Religionism would include clerics claiming to be moral authorities, arguments that scientific phenomena give evidence for God, and unsupported statements about the nature of a god and how he interacts with the world. And here we find no lack of examples, including believers who blame natural disasters on homosexuality, tell us that God doesn’t want us to use condoms, argue that the acceptance of evolution by scientists is a conspiracy, and insist that human morality and the universe’s “fine-tuning” are evidence for God.
It would take volumes to answer all the criticisms leveled at science by believers and accommodationists. Here I’ll briefly consider a half dozen of the most common claims.
Science Can’t Prove That God Doesn’t Exist
When an atheist debates a believer, the conversation often ends with the believer huffily asserting, “Well, anyway, you can’t prove a negative.” What he means is this: “No matter what arguments you raise against God, science can’t demonstrate to me—or anyone—that he doesn’t exist. For, as we all know, science can’t prove that anything doesn’t exist.” That’s a philosophical claim, one I hear quite often. Surprisingly, one claimant is the author and atheist Susan Jacoby:
Of course an atheist can’t prove there isn’t a God, because you cannot prove a negative. The atheist basically says that based on everything I see around me, I don’t think so. Every rational thing I see and have learned about the world around me says there isn’t a God, but as far as proving there isn’t a God, no one can do that. Both the atheist and the agnostic say that.
Believers like the biologist Kenneth Miller, a Catholic, say the same thing:
Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) Page 26