Posted by Steve Schramm Ministries on Saturday, April 6, 2019
Have you ever encountered the claim that only information obtained by the “hard sciences” is reliable and true? In this short video I don’t necessarily refute that claim (though it’s obviously false), but I show the inconsistency of those who take such a position.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hail scientism, but only when it’s convenient! Only when it’s convenient.
You know, as I discuss with other believers, skeptics of Christianity, skeptics of objective worldviews, even, I so often encounter folks who believe that the only way to know anything about the real world is to consult what the hard sciences seem to indicate. And this is a really difficult thing, not the least of which, because science can’t say things.
Scientists, people who are in a position of knowledge to interpret the available scientific evidence, say things, but there’s a problem with that. Scientists disagree. Scientists come to the table on both ends, or from multiple angles, really with assumptions. Sometimes these assumptions are well justified. Sometimes these assumptions are not well justified and so immediately it becomes very, very difficult to just say “scientism” without falling into a logical fallacy of appealing to a majority because of course it could just be that the majority believes this way because some of the rest of the majority believes this way!
People believe things because other people believe them, in other words, and that chain can run pretty much indefinitely. So it’s never necessarily a good thing anyway. We can’t, we can’t just say “scientism,” but what I want to get to know is this idea that scientism is the preferred view of most people until it gets really inconvenient.
Now, when science starts to show that males are always males, females are always females, there’s a distinction to be drawn. Of course, we’re not talking about, you know, the one in a million case where you know, someone is going to be born with both male and female reproductive organs. We’re not talking about that. I’m talking about in general. In principle here we deal with male and female. That’s what we have. Okay? The biology indicates that regardless of what one is dealing with neurologically, okay, so there’s that.
Now it’s also awful inconvenient when we find out from a scientific perspective that humans outside of the womb were humans when they were inside of the womb and, in fact, at no point in the development of the baby was the baby non-human, in other words, the baby didn’t start out as an elephant and then become a human.
The baby started out as a human embryo and moved through different stages of development, became a human fetus and then became a human newborn, but all the way still a human.
So this idea of an appeal to scientism, number one, it’s a bad idea anyway on its own merits, but it doesn’t work really because you can’t hold to it consistently when it goes against your view. When what everybody agrees on, especially, goes against your view, you would be surprised at what you’ll learn in biology class that when you get to sociology class and psychology class is just denied. All right. Now that makes zero sense to me. So hail scientism, but only when it’s convenient and it’s a bad idea, anyway. So watch out for these appeals to scientism and learn how to negate them and they’re pretty easy to negate because you can easily show how someone is being inconsistent with actual facts about actual reality.
