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Evidence · Case 07 · Philosophy

The best defense of scientism, and the reply

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A thoughtful defender can retreat to weak scientism, the modest claim that science is simply the most reliable way to know things, which is not self-refuting. Another defender can say the rule is not a claim about the world at all but a definition, an analytic stipulation, so it is exempt from its own test. Philosopher Jeroen de Ridder, surveying these moves, still concludes that “scientism suffers from self-referential problems.” The reply is twofold. Weak scientism is a different and much smaller claim than the one people use to rule out faith, so conceding it costs the Christian nothing. And calling the rule a mere definition does not rescue it, because it still quietly imports a philosophical commitment about what counts as knowledge, which is exactly what was in question.

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Objections & responses

Weak scientism isn’t harmless to Christianity. If science is the most reliable way to know things, claims that can’t be checked scientifically should be held with low confidence, which is exactly what skeptics say about miracles and the afterlife.

This is the right follow-up, and conceding weak scientism costs the Christian nothing in principle but raises the bar in practice. Weak scientism does raise the bar for non-scientific claims, and the Christian response is to meet it: historical claims are assessed by historical method, philosophical claims by philosophical argument, and both are legitimate ways of knowing that weak scientism does not exclude. What weak scientism cannot do is rule those methods out in advance, which is what the strong version tried to do. The rest of this site is the attempt to clear that raised bar.

The self-refutation charge is too slick. A methodological rule (“prefer scientifically testable beliefs”) isn’t a proposition that needs to pass its own test, any more than “drive on the right” is false because it isn’t itself a car.

This is the strongest form of the reply. A methodological rule still needs a justification, and the justification (this method is reliable) is a substantive claim about the world that is not itself a scientific finding. One can adopt the rule pragmatically, but then one has conceded that at least one important belief, the rule’s own reliability, is held on non-scientific grounds, which is the point. The rule survives as a preference; it does not survive as a limit on what can be known.

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