Pluralism against Scientism

The universe really is beautiful and ugly and inviting and terrifying.

Written by Bo Winegard.

The successes of the scientific revolution cannot be denied. In scarcely five hundred years, we have gone from geocentrism to relativity, from creationism to Darwinism, from alchemy to chemistry.

Yet in our understandable awe at this expansion of knowledge, we risk overvaluing science at the expense of other forms of experience. It becomes tempting to imagine that what science measures is all that matters, that the universe consists only of what can be weighed, counted or graphed. This is the temptation of scientism, the belief that science is not merely one powerful tool among others, but the sole arbiter of truth, the absolute monarch before whom every claim about the world must bow.