Indeed, one historian of philosophy credits Renan with having given ‘birth to the first religion of science,’ and the cultural historian Edwards Said writes that Renan throughout his career ‘seemed to imagine the role of science in human life as…’telling (speaking or articulating) definitively to man the word (logos?) of things.’ Said precisely describes here the confusion of categories characteristic of scientism: it mistakes the truth about quantities, material and spatial realities, for the Logos…
– Michael Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man, p. 36
Science as the logos means ‘in the beginning was science.’ When, for you, science becomes the great organizing principle by which all things hold together, it has become your god. And, as C.S. Lewis liked to say, if you make something into a god it will turn into a devil. There can only be one true Logos. Put him first, and science is fine. Put science first, and that’s another story altogether.
- He is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:17).
