“If you cannot prove it, then I cannot believe it.” This is a claim many students and people who have swallowed the lie of secularism and scientism. The lie or myth is that only what we can prove with the hard sciences can be true.
In this podcast I interview one of my heroes, JP Moreland who demolishes this ideology in his new book Science and Secularism
J.P. Moreland
J.P. Moreland’s is author of many other books including one of my favorites Love Your God With All Your Mind Having earned a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Missouri, an M.A. in philosophy from the University of California, Riverside, and a Th.M in Theology from the Dallas Theological Seminary prior to earning his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Southern California in 1985. He currently holds the title of Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in La Miranda California and is a member of the Board of Advisors for the Center on Culture and Civil Society at the Independent Institute. Moreland’s work combines metaphysics, philosophy of mind, chemistry, and theology, and he is known for his defense of the existence of God and thesupernatural, as well as “Old-Earth” creationism (a form of creationism that is somewhat more compatible with modern science than the “New-Earth” version)
Scientism as “the view that the hard sciences provide the only genuine knowledge of reality,” (20). So then claims about the spiritual world or God or love for that matter, don’t have any authority on this view.
Why is this wrong? Read the book. But for now, here are three reasons and JP offers others in this interview.
Reason 1: Scientism is self refuting because the very statement of it, that scientific truths are the only kind of truth, is not a scientific truth! Ironically, it is a non- scientific truth, which also undermines itself
Reason 2: There are many areas we cannot prove with science alone examples including logic and mathematics (apriori and necessary truths), knowledge of personal conscious states, moral knowledge or knowledge of right and wrong.
Reason 3: Consciousness and physical laws in the foundation of the universe. JP lays out arguments as to why our most intimate thoughts and experiences are not physical thus destabilizing the base of scientism and the very laws which allowed our universe to come into existence are not physical themselves.
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