Scientism Refutes God, but Does Science?

Does science refute God?

I subscribe to the podcasts for the entertaining “Intelligence Squared” debates, but with my schedule it sometimes takes a while to get to them. Here was one from back in December, arguing for and against the statement: “Science refutes God.”

Here are some thoughts in reaction.

One: Shermer misses the point when he says he just wants Christians to be atheistic about “one more god.” He says Christians are “atheists” when it comes to all the other gods humans have believed in, and all he asks is that we be atheistic about “just one more.” It’s a clever line, but it misses the point. There are many different “sciences” out there, but Shermer would say that some are more right that others. Peter Singer’s “science” says we ought to be allowed to kill a child up to the age of 2 if we’re disappointed with it. The “science” of the eugenics movement in the early 20th century engaged in practices and drew conclusions that we find chilling today. There is a “science” that advocates for policies to address global warming and also the “science” that resists the claims behind such advocacy. There are many different “sciences” because that’s how truth is pursued. The fact that some of these sciences have been proven wrong and some of these sciences are currently disputed doesn’t disqualify all scientific claims. And the fact that there have been many and disparate religious claims doesn’t disqualify all religious claims to truth.

Two: Shermer (I think it was Shermer) said that the difference between science and religion is that religion insists that you take “on faith” certain things whereas scientists build doubts into their system. I laughed out loud when he claimed that if things he held to today would be proven wrong tomorrow he would immediately drop his incorrect belief and embrace the new thing. Any undergraduate who’s read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions knows that’s historically not how scientists have responded when their world is shaken by new claims. Kuhn discovered that at every scientific revolution scientists have had to be dragged out of their no-longer-adequate worldview, sometimes across a generation or more. This reality, of course, doesn’t mean science is unreliable in the pursuit of truth; it just means that science is as prone to human frailty as any other human endeavor.

Third: In a question from the audience and a response from the panel, there was a claim that 3 of 5 scientists are atheistic, and there was an assumption that such a stat certainly proved that a study of science leads inexorably to atheism. This ignores the psychological complications of being a scientist who is also a human. Though we humans fancy ourselves as independent thinkers, none of really escaped the tractor beam of peer pressure since we first felt its pull in Middle School.  We are instinctively tribal--we are primal joiners.  This means not only are we anxious to identify with those we consider our peers but we are also desperate to distinguish ourselves from those our peers dismiss.  So, a grad student not only adopts the skepticism of his professors and peers but also wants to avoid the suspicion he's like the yahoos who cling to faith. (I've found that the more a person feels he's vulnerable to this suspicion among his peers—say, because of the part of the country he’s from, or the school he graduated from, or the church he was raised in--the harder he feels he has to work at distinguishing himself from the yahoos.) More about that here.

Fourth: In the end, the debate organizers didn’t have the right statement to argue. Clearly, the question the panel really dealt with was not, “Does science refute God?” but rather, “Does scientism refute God?” There is a big difference between science and scientism. Shermer and the others on his panel advocate for scientism, which is the belief that natural science provides a complete account of everything we see, experience, and seek to understand. This article by Austin Hughes explains how "the reach of scientism exceeds its grasp." Scientism is a philosophical presupposition that we bring into the scientific endeavor rather than something inevitably found within the scientific endeavor. You can learn more about scientism in this lecture at Socrates in the City (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).