Lame Imaginings

The Irony of Scientistic Hubris

In the 2010 film rendition of Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver (Jack Black) arrives in Lilliput from a mysterious unknown land. The Lilliputians are suspicious of him—until he rescues the princess and saves the king. They then hail him as “our savior,” and he uses this newfound status to portray himself as someone fantastically superior to the shipwrecked mailroom clerk he really is. He is the noble and victorious President, and the Awesome from the Island of Manhattan whose father was Darth Vader. He also died in the sinking of the Titanic but was later revived. The Lilliputians’ imaginations are shaped by his completely fabricated lore, so they accept his audacious claims without question and build an elaborate home for him.

“The Science”

The relationship that ensues between Gulliver and the Lilliputians is like that between much of the modern West and the concept of science. Just as Gulliver’s initial act of heroism inspires the Lilliputians to believe he’s more powerful than he actually is, the dazzling feats of modern science have inclined many of us to think of science not simply as a life-enriching tool but as an all-encompassing, life-directing authority. In the popular imagination, science has ascended to a place of privilege in fields where its claims to authority are about as legitimate as Gulliver’s conceits about his personal history. Today, the phrase “The Science” makes an impression on the minds of many moderns similar to the effect “The Crown” had on the minds of medieval English subjects—to question the legitimacy of The Crown was to set oneself at odds with an immutable authority, to step outside the boundaries of the world in which wise and decent people live.

To think of “The Science” this way is to embrace the philosophy of “scientism.” Steven Pinker, one of its giddiest proponents, wrote that “The moral worldview of any scientifically literate person—one who is not blinkered by fundamentalism—requires a clean break from religious conceptions of meaning and value. … The worldview that guides the moral and spiritual values of a knowledgeable person today is the worldview given to us by science.”¹ Similarly, T. H. Huxley (a.k.a. “Darwin’s Bulldog”) captured the epistemology of scientism more than a hundred years ago when he said, “The scientific method [is] the only method by which truth could be ascertained … it is inevitable that [what is called] the scientific method must extend itself to all forms of enquiry.”²

But enthroning science as a supreme arbiter in “all forms of inquiry” results in something like an attempt to reproduce the full text of Hamlet in Morse code. As unequivocal as such language may be—or as promising as it may seem—many of the most important aspects of human flourishing are no more accessible to the scientific method than they are to Morse code. We should be deeply grateful for the ways science and technology have enriched our lives, but we should also realize the limits of scientific insight.

The good news is hubris inevitably ends in folly. The more overconfident adherents to scientism become, the more they expose the fact that the most important things in life lie outside the scope of science.

The Overconfident Paranormal Investigator

There are few better examples of tragicomic, overconfident scientism than the argument proposed by radio host and paranormal investigator Carrie Poppy in her 2017 TED talk, “A Scientific Approach to the Paranormal.” She began by explaining some disturbing phenomena she experienced upon entering her home: hearing spooky wind noises and feeling a physical pressure on her chest and a distinct sense of dread as if she were being watched. She naively suspected these to be signs of a haunting and even resorted to a spiritual cleansing ritual in which she burned sage to repel evil spirits.

But then she consulted a group of skeptics who suggested that her home was not haunted but had been poisoned by a carbon monoxide leak. So she called the gas company. The technician who came out told her, “It’s a really good thing that you called us tonight, because you could have been dead very soon.” Her audience then erupted in a response of sympathetic triumph.

She explains that this liberating “disillusionment” was the epiphany that led her to become a paranormal investigator focusing on scientific explanations of alleged paranormal activity. In the culmination of her talk, she concludes, “I’ve done over 70 investigations like this. I would love to tell you that nine times out of ten, science wins, saves the day, it’s all explained. That’s not true. [Rhetorical pause] The truth is, ten times out of ten, science wins. It saves the day!”

As one might expect, this also triggers a swell of victorious applause from the scientistically minded congregation. It’s doubtful any of them realized that their very reaction gave clear evidence of a distinctly nonmaterial reality to which they all had access.

The Elephant in the Room of Scientistic Triumphalism

The folly comes to light when we consider exactly what Ms. Poppy was being commended for. What specifically does science “win”? And what are we saved from when science “saves the day”? Clearly, the supposed victory is that of science over superstition, which came when she “learned” that all events thought to be caused by supernatural powers were actually caused by purely material causes—causes completely accessible to the scientific method. The unstated premise is that spiritual beings (if they exist at all) cannot affect material things. Therefore, we are saved from “superstition” by always appealing to “science” rather than to religious or supernatural explanations. In this way, truth wins over falsehood.

And so Ms. Poppy is commended by the audience for the honorable trait of aligning her beliefs with the facts, even when the facts are contrary to her preconceived notions. While fools would rather believe a happy lie than a disturbing truth, she values the truth, and the audience applauds her virtue in this respect. She is praiseworthy, while others who choose familiarity and comfort over truth are derelict.

But the elephant in this room of naturalistic triumphalism is that, without a free and undetermined will—that is, apart from the human capacity for decision-making—there can be no such thing as moral praise or blame.

In choosing to acknowledge the greater value of one thing (the truth) over another (personal bias), Ms. Poppy affects the material realm via a nonmaterial cause—the force of her will—by choosing to focus her attention on, and change, her behavior. As C. S. Lewis explains, “If we are in fact spirits, not Nature’s offspring, then there must be some point (probably the brain) at which created spirit even now can produce effects on matter not by manipulation or technics but simply by the wish to do so. If that is what you mean by magic then magic is a reality manifested every time you move your hand or think a thought.”³

Nonmateriality & the Meaning of Words

This may seem like a controversial point, but it is a matter of fact confirmed in common experience. If a man gets drunk at a party and says to someone he’s barely met, “I love you” or “Did you know I used to be an astronaut?”, another person—a friend, perhaps worried for his safety—might say, “Don’t take him seriously. It’s the alcohol talking.” This is common enough to be cliché, and it illustrates our understanding of the indissoluble, nonmaterial soul of human beings.

The idea that we shouldn’t take a drunk person’s words seriously clarifies the distinction between the chemical and the person. We know that the words of an intoxicated person are suspect because the words are attributed to the effect of a chemical (alcohol) rather than to the person. It’s not him talking. The thoughts the words express are not originating from his mind, or at least not from his “right mind.”

To use another example, the words “I love you” are only meaningful if they come from the heart, that is from the spiritual will or intent of the individual. It does not matter whether it’s the alcohol or the natural-chemicals-in-the-brain-since-birth talking. If one believes that human beings are entirely reducible to, and thus determined by, chemical reactions, then every word any person ever says is just as nonsensical and meaningless as the words of a thoroughly drunk person.

As Sam Harris says about one’s ability to choose his outlook and behavior, “There is no extra part of me [apart from spiritless matter] that could decide to see the world differently.”⁴ If this is so, the appropriate response to every word ever spoken would be, “Pay no attention. That’s just the chemicals talking.” But, of course, we’re then left with the very tricky problem of taking seriously the words of the person telling us that all other words are only caused by mindless chemicals. When someone admonishes us to drop our belief in a nonmaterial will and attribute everything about human beings to biochemicals, there is always an implicit expectation that we make an exception for the one speaking.

This being the case, every time someone makes an argument, every time we speak the truth to counter a falsehood, every time we declare with conviction, “I mean it! With all my heart!” we are making emphatic and pronounced our nonmaterial, spiritual nature, which can no more be attributed to atoms and chemicals than a man’s self-sacrifice in battle can be attributed to a nervous reflex. Medals are not given to commemorate an excess of adrenaline. White gowns and wedding rings are not poetic expressions of reproductive hormones.

The Lamest

Those who take pride in intellectual superiority for forcing spirit and matter into a zero-sum game bring to mind another character from Gulliver’s Travels. General Edward Edwardian is jealous of Gulliver, but his attempt to establish his superiority backfires when he tries to use language from Gulliver’s world that he doesn’t understand: 

Gulliver (unaware that Edward is approaching from behind): “This Edward guy seems like kind of a lame ass.”

Edward(indignantly): “A lame what? It is my impression that ‘lame ass’ is a negative expression from whence you came. If this is the case, you shall be thrown into stocks!”

Gulliver: “No, no, no, no. ‘Lame ass’ means great, brave, courageous—heart-of-a-lion man.”

Edward: “Then I am not just a lame ass. I am a big lame ass.”

Gulliver: “The biggest!”

Edward: “I, General Edward Edwardian, am the biggest lame ass in all of the land!”

Delusions of Degradation

People who think they are exposing the impossibility of nonmaterial reality by triumphantly proclaiming, “Ten times out of ten, science saves the day,” are playing General Edwardian’s role, but in the opposite direction. Edward has a delusion of grandeur, which is comically exposed by his ignorance of a certain phrase; naturalist philosophers have a delusion of degradation. They think they are only tissues and chemical configurations, when really, they are blazing spirits—a truth ironically revealed in the spiritual passion with which they argue against the possibility of spiritual power.

Notes
1. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now, The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2019), p. 394.
2. T. H. Huxley, “Professor Huxley on Men of Science,” The Mechanics’ Magazine (October 14, 1871), pp. 284-85; quoted in The Territories of Science and Religion, by Peter Harrison (2015).
3. C. S. Lewis, Miracles, Ch. 16.
4. Sam Harris, Free Will.

—This article has been adapted from Truth Before Logic: Finding Wisdom with G. K. Chesterton in a World Blinkered by Scientism, by Mike Mitchell (Resource Publications, 2024).