Personal Commitment to Truth vs. the Scientistic Paradigm

One of the controversial topics of our day in philosophy of religion is the so-called “new atheism.” It’s a bit of a misleading term, since there’s really nothing new about this atheism except that it thinks that respect for religion is not warranted or immoral (where they get their standard of morality is a discussion for another time). The major figures of this movement include Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins, all of whom think that religion and religious people are following what Dawkins calls the “God delusion.” God, they say, is an unwarranted hypothesis resulting from some sort of cognitive malfunction.

I do not intend here to address the absurd attacks that these thinkers mount against theism, but to address the issue that is at the heart of their thinking: scientism. Scientism is the idea that science is the premier and paradigmatic form of knowledge because of its disinterested pursuit of “the facts.” It’s an attractive picture, really: the scientist as the priest of the mystery religion of science, doing strange and wonderful experiments to get at the utter essence of the universe. And, to make it even more attractive, the method is completely dispassionate, with no presuppositions: a purity that would make the ancient Pythagoreans drool with envy.

Such is the mythology of science, and a powerful mythology it is: a heady mixture of optimism, reason, and romanticism. The trouble is, though, that it is a misleading myth: science is not without its presuppositions. For example, the early scientists, such as Isaac Newton, operated with certain presuppositions: effects have causes, what happens today will happen tomorrow, the universe operates according to universal laws, and so on. In addition, since the 17th Century, scientists have built up a great tradition of doing science, without which, it would lose itself. Thus, new discoveries build upon earlier ones, old experiments are done in new conditions, and the body of theory and hypothesis grows.

This is not in any way intended to denigrate science or its achievements, only point out that it too is bound by commitments to certain propositional attitudes and presuppositions. Indeed, no discipline could proceed unless its community of scholarship agreed, to some degree, upon common methods and approaches. What it does do is to shatter the edifices of scientism, of which the new atheists are modern-day prophets. It is a fact that we must accept that no fact can be established without a set of commitments that help to establish it. No argument can proceed without premises, after all, so no discipline can proceed without commitments.

Of course this destroys utterly the myth of objectivity. Here I have to be careful to distinguish between objectivity and absolute truth: I am committed to the existence and knowability of absolute truth. However, we cannot know it objectively, in a kind of dispassionate detached way. To grasp a fact in this way is not to know it, for knowledge is a much more intimate and passionate kind of thing. In order to know truth, we must be rightly related to it. It is this fact which scientism fails to grasp, and thus, for all the accomplishments of science, the philosophy of scientism is a chasing after wind.

But unless truth itself is personal, how could one be in any sort of relation to it? Much less a right one? Yet this is what Christianity uniquely provides: the Truth Himself, the eternal Word, came down. So when Pilate the cynical Roman politician asked “what is truth?” Jesus was silent, for if Pilate even then would not recognize that the Truth was standing in front of him, nothing more could be said. Only if one is in a right relationship to Truth can one know the Truth. And only if one knows the Truth can the Truth make one free.

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