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Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology
J.P. Moreland
Crossway (2018). 222 pp.
The contemporary intellectual climate has an iconic view of science due to the tacit belief that the natural sciences provide seemingly exhaustive explanatory power in depicting reality. Science, as we know it, holds enormous power and authority over the intellectual climate of our day. In order to gain intellectual credibility and legitimacy in the modern world, one is led to believe that the only things that exist are those that can be observed and explained by empirical scientific methods. In this book, Scientism and Secularism, J.P. Moreland argues that the contemporary scientific worldview, known as scientism, has become the new orthodoxy for making truth claims about reality. Moreland defines scientism as a view which holds that “the hard sciences—like chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy—provide the only genuine knowledge of reality” (p. 26). According to Moreland, scientism is not only as pervasive as the “air we breathe” (p. 31) but also shapes the way we understand reality and what it means to us. This view leads people to believe that only science has the authority and credibility to address matters of truth. According to this line of reasoning, any discipline which cannot be empirically measured—including the humanities, morality and religious discourse is considered illegitimate. As such, scientism is pervasive to the contemporary intellectual and cultural discourse, extending into the moral, educational, and political disciplines. That means, for example, the humanities such as music, literature, art, drama, architecture, and poetry are not considered as matters of significance or consequence.
What Moreland is concerned about is how scientism undermines Christianity’s fundamental and important truth claims about God and our faith in him. By reducing the Christian faith to a private opinion and subjective belief, scientism has the effect of secularizing large and crucial dimensions of our lives. Moreland worries that scientism negatively “puts Christian claims outside of the plausibility structure (what people generally consider reasonable and rational)” in such a way that “our deepest beliefs about life, knowledge, history, and reality will seem to be utterly implausible, not just untrue, but unworthy of consideration” (p. 31). Consequently, scientism affects the way we make adjudicatory judgments on truth, moral knowledge, human freedom, and the principle of tolerance in the contemporary culture. In so doing, scientism renders Christian belief ineffective and irrelevant in the current cultural discourse and destroys confidence in Christianity among the young Christian students in American universities.
In chapter 3, Moreland describes how the intellectual battle for obtaining knowledge and understanding has been lost to the corrosive effects of scientism and secularism. The university culture has shifted to the thinking that “values” are considered as private, subjective, and culturally relative while the “facts” are deemed as public, objective and obligatory for everyone (p. 45). This means that students are bereft of categories for determining matters of religion, faith, ethics/morality, and human flourishing in the world. From this line of reasoning, the university culture has left students to decide for themselves on matters of character development and how to live well. Moreland laments that the “responsibility for moral and religious development, then, became solely the burden of the humanities. Professors of literature, art, history, language, and philosophy were all who were left to unify the meaning of students’ lives and to teach values both for university life in general and for the curriculum in particular” (p. 47).
Assessing matters from the vantage point of a scientist, philosopher, and theologian, Moreland argues, in a refreshing way (in chapter 4), that the notion of scientism is self-refuting and self-defeating. Moreland objects to the version of strong scientism (that science is the only reliable path to knowledge) which claims that “only what is testable by science can be true.” He contends that this statement is self-refuting and false because the statement’s own content implies that there can never be any further research or scientific discoveries that can demonstrate the statement to be true. At the end of the day, Moreland convincingly shows that scientism is not science but a philosophical view of science that takes us captive. In short, scientism is not about doing scientific research from a neutral objective stance, but it is a particular philosophical interpretation of science that attempts to interpret reality from an empirical frame of reference.
The effect of scientism is pervasive in the current intellectual, cultural, and scientific establishments. Scientism does not deal with scientific data per se, but it is a philosophical claim (with commitment to naturalism) that purports to provide explanatory power to account for all human, biological, psychological, social, and cultural phenomena in the world. Moreland contends that scientism is not scientific at all because it does not provide adequate and “necessary presuppositions that justify practicing science,” (chapter 5), he goes as far as to say that scientism itself is an enemy to science because by going beyond the scope of what science can claim, “scientism distorts genuine knowledge and hurts the enterprise of science” (p. 95).
Moreland argues that our culture’s uncritical acceptance of scientism stems from not utilizing the discipline of philosophy to rationally investigate and adjudicate the assumptions and presuppositions of the scientific worldview and its metaphysical commitment to the spatio-temporal plausibility structures of the world. Moreland proposes that the way forward is to have philosophers as the gatekeepers to help define the nature and rationality of science and scientific (and at times conflicting) claims about reality and “for what is and what is not reasonable to believe” (p. 124). Philosophy plays the role of asking questions and differentiates the scope of what science can and cannot do. For example, Moreland uses philosophical reasoning to make the following claims about what science cannot explain: (1) the origin of the universe, (2) the origin of the fundamental laws of nature, (3) the fine-tuning of the universe, (4) the origin of consciousness, and (5) the existence of moral, rational, and aesthetic objective laws and intrinsically valuable properties in the world.
Having shown the implausibility and incoherence of scientism, Moreland acknowledges that science is a valuable enterprise worthy of pursuit because science has a lot to offer our knowledge of reality in the world. He suggests that the way forward is to commit to conceptual and personal integration of Christianity and science. The aim of this integration is to “provide rational justification for Christian truth claims” (p. 178) within the framework of Christian theism without having to succumb to the corrosive effects of scientism. The confidence and clarity Moreland expresses throughout the book are informative and refreshing, this work is valuable in providing an up-to-date discussion of the impact of scientism on the culture and Christian belief. It may not convince every reader of the validity of the arguments from the framework of Christian theism or those who are not sympathetic to the intelligent design movement, nevertheless, the book remains a helpful guide for those who are in the science-and-theology discussion, one promising for further study, debate, and research.
Kiem Le is the lead pastor of Living Word Community Church, San Jose, CA and professor of theology at Alliance Evangelical Divinity School, CA. He holds a PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
