Scientism's main problem -- it can't be verified scientifically

This idea is part of the wider, unquestioned and unconscious conviction of our culture that science has discovered and can discover all the secrets of existence. In the deeply religious and despotic philosophy of scientism (not science), such conviction is the paradigm of the virtue of faith: blind trust that the revelations made by the scientific method are the ultimate truths.

The twin to this conviction is that science will bring us salvation. The world is dying because of pollution, but scientists are going to come up with a way to scrub the atmosphere clean. We have eaten ourselves into disease and obesity, but medicine will create a drug to make us healthy and lean.

Theoretical physicists are the new metaphysicists, cellular biologists and psychiatrists are the new sages on the nature (or lack of nature) of man, and engineers are the new moral philosophers.

But the scientific method cannot verify that the scientific method works, and it is self-refuting for science to make a claim that it cannot be used to support: that science is the only way to know what is true. Science cannot test this statement any more than a hand can hold itself.

[This has always been’s science’s limitation. It can tell us how, and when, and what — but not why. That doesn’t make science unimportant, but it also means that it’s not the ultimate authority, either. — Ed]