The public, taught by the sociologist to distrust its traditional morality, is grateful to receive it back from him in a scientifically branded wrapping.
– Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 234
Polanyi was all over the idea that modern Science (with a capital S, not the kind he loved and practiced) had essentially become a popular religion. Put the stamp of science on it and it becomes like the law of the Medes and Persians.
Lewis on how culture received, revered, and embellished Darwin’s teachings:
…If science [had] not met the imaginative need, science would not have been so popular. But probably every age gets, within certain limits, the science it desires.
– C.S. Lewis, The Funeral of a Great Myth, from Christian Reflections
This quote is loaded. The imaginative need of a person (or culture) determines what knowledge that person (or culture) will seek; and the knowledge a person seeks determines what he or she will find; and none of this necessarily determines whether that person will find truth. If you send Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton into a forest to study trees and insects, their findings may differ altogether; and their findings may or may not be received as truth, regardless of whether or not either is actually true (depending on the imaginative needs of a culture); and if this is so, it is time to start questioning presuppositions – not just findings.
This is an old post, but someone brought to my attention that the link was broken. I am updating it with the video embedded. I’ve listened to the talk several times now and it is one of the best talks on C.S. Lewis, Scientism, and culture in general that I have ever heard.
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I’ve written a bit on Scientism on the blog. N.D. Wilson’s talk on Scientism at the Desiring God conference on C.S. Lewis is excellent. I am going to have to listen to it a few times to mull it over. Until then, you can watch or listen to it HERE. Note: Link is dead
John Owen comments that prayer and scientific discussion can have something in common – many do both simply by repeating what they have heard or what they think they should be saying. And in so doing, they give up their humanity.
…Just as birds are taught by men to say ‘Goodbye,’ or ‘Farewell,’ or ‘God bless you.’ Such prayers and desires are uttered by birds without the semblance of emotion or humanity, and with no notion of what they are saying – it is but an exercising of their tongues. In this exact way, many men are trained for the sciences and seem to be most wise.
-John Owen, Biblical Theology, p. 92
I have been reading and writing about Scientism (which I briefly define below) a good bit lately. The reason for this is that I am in the process of studying Evolutionary Psychology in my university studies. I will not get into that in this post (I’ve written about it ELSEWHERE), but only mention it as the primary reason for my interest here. I gained insight from an unlikely place today:
A while back when I was reading The Everlasting Man, by G.K. Chesterton, I took note of this quote about Augustine of Hippo:
The war upon life, the denial of nature, were exactly the things he had already found in the heathen world outside the Church, and had to renounce when he entered the Church (p. 225-226).
Chesterton’s point is that Augustine’s Manichean asceticism was something that he would come to repent of. Let me say that again, he had to repent of his worldly asceticism. But that was not all he had to repent of.
He saw, in the Manichaeans, a tendency to scoff at those who believed without hard proof, while at the same time demanding that people do just that in order to buy into their system. In this he came to see the inherent contradiction:
I thought that the Church was entirely honest in this and far less pretentious than the Manichaeans, who laughed at people who took things on faith, made rash promises of scientific knowledge, and then put forward a whole system of preposterous inventions which they expected their followers to believe on trust because they could not be proved.
The honesty of the church, of which he wrote, was her willingness to confess that existence of mysteries that were beyond human explanation. He continues,
I began to realize that I believed countless things which I had never seen or which had taken place when I was not there to see – so many events in the history of the world, so many facts about places and towns which I had never seen, and so much that I believed on the word of friends or doctors or various other people. Unless we took these things on trust, we should accomplish nothing at all in this life (Confessions, 6.5).
From here, Augustine would go on to formulate his famous stance of ‘I believe in order to know.’ But I say this as an aside.
The issue that I want to ponder for a moment is that Augustine’s original contention with the Manichaeans is very much like that we face with modern Scientism. I do not say science, I say Scientism (the elevating of science to the point that it, and it alone, has all the answers, and that all reality is essentially physical). You can call it scientific materialism if you like – scoffing at those who take things on faith, but, at the same time, demanding precisely the same thing. So often, they deny the existence of the soul because it cannot be seen while speaking of the Big Bang as if they were there when it happened, or speaking of Evolution as if the spawning of the first primordial ooze was broadcast on CNN.
From Michael Polanyi to Cornelius Van Til to John Frame such nonsense has been answered for years – we all take things on faith. The ultimate issue not whether we take things on faith, but on what authority we base our faith. Augustine’s answer was the Scriptures. Scientism’s answer is man.
But that is not really my point. What struck me as I was reading the Confessions today was that this is not a new fight that we are engaged in. Scientism has reared its ugly head in various forms for centuries. But who would of thought the Manichaeans fell in this group? Chesterton pointed out that Augustine had to renounce worldly asceticism. It seems too that Augustine had to renounce worldly ‘blind faith’ as well – deciding that if he were to ‘take things on faith’ he must find a firmer foundation than the observations of the Manichaeans provided. He found that foundation in the Holy Scriptures.
