Bill Kubina

Scientism Ideology and the Empirical Paradigm Crisis

An over confidence in the absolute truth of scientific knowledge fuels an empirically

based, but often very self-righteous ideological paradigm which is often referred to as
"Scientism". A pop-culture oshoot from the philosophy of "Naturalism", this ideology
implies that for anything to be really true, it must be observable and measured by the
scientific method. Therefore, everything from the origin of our universe, the transcendental
nature of our soul, to the ontological status of god, love, and human purpose must pass the
measurement of Scientism. While science, as a body of knowledge has no claims to
ideologies, a general ideology of popular science enthusiasts has emerged. This basic
ideology is an entity which is greater than the sum of it's philosophical parts. Though the
proliferation of popular science and the ability to easily access data in the Information Age,
Scientism appears to be a sensible worldview to many intelligent people. However it is
imperative that citizens of our global society continue to question the foundations and
scope of scientific knowledge as our world is faced with financial, ecological, and ethical
crises; whose outcomes depend on broad minded thinking. It is dangerous to our psyches,
planet, and citizens to believe that only hard science can usurp any and all philosophical,
epistemological, religious, transcendental or ethical knowledge. The current troubles of the
world should serve as evidence that this materialistic paradigm is simply not working.

In the Information Age, knowledge appears to be just a click away. Besides all of the
data in libraries across the globe, YouTube is filled with lectures on almost any topic
imaginable and nearly anyone in a first world country has access to it. It appears to be easier
than ever to find out the answers to our questions and learn bonafide skills in almost any
endeavor. This resource of knowledge can simultaneously be fact checked by cross-checking
and researching deeper into your study until one reaches exhaustion. It is likely that a
person would run out of time or energy before Google runs out of results. It appears that
endless knowledge is available. It is also for this reason that many millennials feel more
confident in their opinions about the world. We don't just research things on Wikipedia
everyday, we're likely to engage in public discourse through social media about it. Our posts
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about social issues, and the "real world" turn into our convicted worldviews. How quick is it
to win an argument by quickly Google searching for some research? Just "prove" your case
by posting a link! You can then easily taunt your defeated opponent with one victorious
word: "Science!"

Scientism is the general ideology that only what can be observed and confirmed by
the scientific method is actually true. This popular attitude is founded on the philosophical
positions of Naturalism, which argue that simply nothing exists beyond what the hard
sciences can ocially confirm or falsify. Yet many people, (including generations of
scientists), simply accept the truth value of popular science without ever considering it's
philosophical foundations. Many may be surprised to note that modern science is actually
founded on philosophical assumptions which alone do not have anything more than a
rational argument to back them up. Therefore modern science cannot prove the objectivity
of modern science by using modern science. For example, one of the foundational
assumptions is that the best way to obtain factual knowledge is through the senses. Without
this assumption, there can be no science experiments. Without eyes, it's hard to measure
the dierences in colors. Yet there is no empirical basis to the claim that observational
experimentation is an objective way to acquire knowledge, it is simply accepted because it
makes sense logically. Therefore, the beginning of science, is actually philosophy. The
problem with Scientism, is that it tries to usurp philosophy by making "Science" the proof
content of logic, rather than rationalism as the proof of logic. It doesn't hold up.

However the perpetual myth that science is the bastion of all truth is a hard claim to
deny. When used correctly, scientific research provides nearly irrefutable evidence about
empirical matters, and supplying this kind of proof for one's argument is the perfect
opportunity for a "mic drop" moment when you just know that you're right about
something. There is nothing at all wrong with good science, but when people put their faith
in empirical methods as the absolute judge of reality, it becomes more like an ideology than
an intelligent rational tool. This worldview misses the fact that science has foundations and
also limits; in other words it is not the beginning or ending of knowledge. Questioning the
place of science does not dismiss or hinder science either, but it simply keeps it in it's place.
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The great thing about science is that is is based on a rational evaluation of evidence: but
granting wholesale truth-values only to scientism shows a blatant bias in reasoning which
makes it appear much more like a dogmatic belief system.

There is a myth about science that it is totally unbiased. And scientists generally will
work well beyond their personal biases, But the public often does have enough practice to
think this way. After collecting lots of scientific research, a normal person may make their
opinions about the world; yet without understanding that most all scientific opinions are
based on an empirical worldview, its no wonder that people can only imagine a world based
on things which can be observed with the senses. Hence, scientism seems to be becoming a
prominent belief system in the Information Age and people do not know that the vast
majority of scientific research is being done in the empirical paradigm.

As access to information has become omnipresent through the internet, "popular

science" has become one of the most popular topics for blog posts or news articles. There is
a serious problem when so called "scientific facts" from unscrupulous sites turn out to be
fake, or that after many years even respected academic findings are disproven. Remember
when doctors claimed cigarettes were safe? While the internet is filled with studies and data,
much of the conclusions in popular science articles are simply "opinions based on facts".
Yet, so many people in our world today base their own knowledge and ideology from these
sources of information.

Generally a religious person gets a book of knowledge and begins to study it's
assertions. They experiment with it's prescriptions as they build faith in it's conclusions.
Similarly, a science student generally gets a book of knowledge and begins to study it's
assertions, while experimenting with it's prescriptions as they build faith in it's conclusions.
Both people experiment, but both also have to invest some initial trust in it's teachings.
Each of them must have some faith in whichever knowledge that they are personally unable
to experience or falsify first hand. An astrophysics student may never see a black hole,
biology student may never see more than a fuzzy image thats supposed to be "DNA", and a
spiritualist may not have any visual evidence for their soul but they all simply continue on
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the faith that as further foundational evidence is acquired, the logical conclusion of a thesis
is eminent.

Faith is a part of the human experience. Scientism relies on faith in a variety of ways
just like religions. The point is that none of us are truly independent thinkers because we all
put trust in knowledge that we receive from established authorities. I don't have to
personally research that E=mc2 because I have faith in Princeton, and therefore faith in
Einstein, and I do not have to personally take a DNA test to find out who my father is
because I trust my mother's word. Surely in both cases there may be a mistake, but we
accept lots of knowledge in this world on faith and just move on with our lives; no man can
claim to have concluded all truths on his own. This raises valid questions about how
independent the claims of science are from bias or illusion.

Scientism is the ideological heir to philosophies like Positivism and Reductionism

which sought to source all of their knowledge exclusively from empirically verifiable
observations and unified theories. Today most scientism is backed up with Naturalist
philosophies. These are all basically forms of Materialism, under dierent names, but
Scientism is the overall pop culture belief in the absolute truth of science (and only
"science"). So according to scientism, proponents do not accept any knowledge that cannot
be empirically verified. Therefore scientism is characterized by its reliance on observation
and falsifiability and proposes to eliminate any kind of speculative or subjective truth. The
idea is that for something to be "Scientific", then it must be subject to objective study and
falsifiability. If it cannot pass these tests, Naturalists and believers in Scientism reject it.
However the reduction of all knowledge to hard science has failed multiple times in the past
and there are many other "scientific" forms of knowledge that do not strictly rely on the
scientific method or falsifiability like Aesthetics, Religion, economics, etc. Many things
which exist are not really falsifiable, most notably mathematics, and hence as Timothy
Williamson argued in his New York Times opinion piece "On Ducking Challenges to
Naturalism",
"If it is true that all truths are discoverable by hard science, then it is discoverable by hard science that
all truths are discoverable by hard science. But it is not discoverable by hard science that all truths are
 Bill Kubina

discoverable by hard science. Are all truths discoverable by hard science? is not a question of hard
science. Therefore the extreme naturalist claim is not true." 1

Today, as most natural scientists have rightfully relinquished their aspirations to

overtake specific fields like economics and political science, there still seems to be a
materialistic bias in fields like philosophy, psychology and ecology. While the empirical
method is excellent at achieving many technological feats, hard science has miserably failed
at solving psychological issues like depression, social problems like world hunger, and it has
not been able to stop the causes of environmental pollution. The logical conclusion here is
not that hard science should have been able to thwart would-be polluters or the medical
causes of depression, but that instead that there is an ideological bias which favors hard
science as a cure-all for modern woes and therefore other potential solutions are either
ignored or under utilized. Material technology is significantly failing at addressing the
humanitarian issues of the world.

None of this would have to bother anyone. Presumably, some people could just hold
their opinion that science is the ultimate knowledge and others could enjoy their own
philosophies or any combination of both; but the ideological ramifications of Scientism
rhetoric are potentially very dangerous for many people of the world. Just as Christian
Crusaders left disastrous causalities in their fundamentalist wake, the past 200 years of
Industrialized Capitalism has totally transformed the planet physically and socially, and was
often justified by scientific proofs. The technological advancements of modern science
provided the means to suck and waste natural resources, while Scientism's promises of
perfect and controlled human evolution gave the ideological reasoning for thinking men to
continue down psychologically dark roads. Horrible scientifically backed belief systems like
Eugenics were praised by Hitler in his "Mein Kampf " and instrumental in his reasoning for
the Holocaust. Marxist Socialism was purportedly a scientific way of governing society
based on natural laws, and severe human rights violations were the result. And today, the

1Williamson, T. (n.d.). On Ducking Challenges to Naturalism - The New York Times. Retrieved
November 13, 2016, from https://www.scribd.com/document/289748683/On-Ducking-
Challenges-to-Naturalism-The-New-York-Times
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industrial capitalist agenda is implicitly backed by modern science simply because it is

almost impossible to impede the "progress" of technological developments long enough to
seriously study all of the ramifications possible. We're left with a disgusting amount of space
pollution, tremendous exploitation of natural resources and third world civilizations while
those in the western world try to enjoy the creature comforts of brand new technologies.
Sadly the promises of scientism may have failed humanity because even though some of us
reap materialistic prizes from science, there may be just as many problems being created due
to the lack of philosophical checks and balances about whether or not this materialistic
agenda is helping the world at large. The decline of Eugenics is an interesting example of a
supposedly empirical science which was forced to a paradigm shift due to ethical and
philosophical knowledge. I am arguing that the Materialistic Paradigm of modern science is
flawed at it's philosophical presuppositions because the boons which result from that form
of knowledge are not truly solving the human problems of life, and are rather just
superficially dealing with the material issues.

Some say that Scientism is not just a mistake amongst laypeople. Paul Feyerabend,
speaking in reference to positivism, claimed that its impossible for science to "contain
knowledge independent of ideology, social prejudice, etc." 2, therefore even those who think
they have escaped a philosophical ideology and are strictly "scientific" are mistaken. So if we
cannot escape our ideology, the question is, is Scientism helpful? If Scientism means that
empirical science alone should be able to solve human problems then I would say no.
Empirical science itself cannot even approach the hard problems of philosophy or religion,
and it does an often clumsy job at long term solutions for the other main problems of the
world. Religion, art, and philosophy can deal with the problem of death, but hard science
can only deal with the symptoms of death. What other non-physical issues are there that
science leaves behind? According to the University of California, Berkeley, "Science aims to
explain and understand, ...Classically, science's main goal has been building knowledge and

McLellan, D. (1986). Ideology. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. p. 67

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understanding."3. This idea is one of the main reasons people turn to scientific information;
they think it's a good foundation to build their worldview! But seems however that hard
science is not adequate to solve psychological issues, or social woes. No medical procedure
or medicine has been able to stop crime, heal depression, or "cure" death. Why is it that if
scientific knowledge begins and ends in material nature, that we have been able to create
nano computers that fit in our pockets but are unable to address basic human needs of
health and happiness? Is this the only knowledge that humans should utilize? Why do we
have the means to solve world hunger and yet people go on starving, and in spite of all
medical advancement cancer rates are increasing rather than decreasing? Technological
discoveries have made some of us thrive materially, but national happiness levels go down.
This doesn't seem like a holistic "knowledge and understanding" to me; it sounds like a
materialist ideology.

This all should be enough reason for a thinking person to seriously consider what is
the philosophical checks and balance that could prevent misinterpretation of scientific
knowledge and what is it's proper use in an individual or society's lives. But materialistic
science education is prioritized all throughout K-12 education while our capitalist society
forces workers to use college as "career training" and leaves little time for philosophical
questions about the nature of knowledge. In spite of the recent economic crisis, persistent
scares of global warming, and the environmental dangers of using fossil fuels, most people go
on with their business as usual. The paradigm of modern science hasn't changed much in
response to these unfortunate side eects of human technology, and instead are often
marginalized by the constant promises of scientific progress. Electric cars and recycling
programs are not enough. People seem afraid to tread a revolutionary path against the
forward march of materialistic technological advancement, and its easy to see why. When I
was a kid I was told that scientists were fixing the planet with their discoveries, but as I've
grown older I have unfortunately found that the discoveries of science often are just
dovetailed to commercial and corporate interests and which end up counteracting much of
the solutions that benevolent scientists try to provide.

3Science aims to explain and understand. (n.d.). Retrieved November 13, 2016, from http://
undsci.berkeley.edu/article/0_0_0/whatisscience_04
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Therefore I believe that the modern paradigm of science is heavily influenced by a

materialistic and Scientism bias, even if inadvertently. By not considering that there are
significant philosophical presuppositions of science, which should be enough to warrant
considerations of other logical, religious, or speculative philosophies to life's problems,
science may always be crippled as it fails to explain the things it cannot properly test (like
the subjective human consciousness). Still there is a frustratingly self-righteous air to the
scientific agenda. As it surely has been very successful in manifesting material fruits, its hard
to deny that the system works for many things from architecture, to electronics, physics,
and medicine. But the problematic side-eects and oversights are often spotted too little
and way too late.

The presuppositions of modern science are rooted in empirical materialism, and an

ideology of Scientism is propagated as a result . This paradigm is implicitly (even if
unintentionally) propounded by the US education systems and is becoming a prominent
belief system amongst educated people in the data driven Information Age. Yet it is ever
important for intelligent people to question and challenge this ideology because of its
incipient nature. Reductionist movements within academia have continuously attempted to
make the soft sciences, philosophy, and religion obsolete, but the human factor continues to
resist reducibility to material formulas. Thinking people should never accept Scientism, or
any ideology without skepticism, but in order to utilize the greatness of science itself,
believers in the agenda of science should broaden and deeply develop their philosophical
acumen. With the continual advent of so many ecological, economic, social, and
psychological crises in the world, it's about time that the paradigm of purely materialistic
science is reevaluated for it's practical eectiveness.