Many men of good faith do not realize that science will never abdicate its current role as man’s sole and exclusive route to certain knowledge. Science itself demands its world to be the exclusive domain of certain knowledge.

I have presented in many essays a critique of the modern experience of Western man and his society (see, e.g., here, here, and here). That critique grows out of a penetrating examination of the work begun by Rene Descartes in the 17th Century. The critique is principally the work of one lone scholar, Robert J. Loewenberg, of the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies. While much ink has been spilt on Descartes’ fundamental contribution to both modern philosophy and science, the failure to grasp the depth of the Cartesian contribution to what I term the Redirection is wholly understandable.

It is understandable precisely because the Redirection has so completely altered the way modern man experiences the world and his existence in it. Any attempt to gain some perspective to permit a critical examination is nearly impossible. Even for those rare souls who achieve the required clarity, the perch they find is mostly unstable and subject to erosion and collapse.

Having conceded the engrossing effect of the Redirection, one is still able to gain some clarity with a rigorously critical eye. It remains, however, easier to understand what Descartes achieved than how he did it. The how we are leaving for Loewenberg’s soon-to-be-published précis on his major work. The what we have described before and I repeat here only in slightly modified form but with an eye to the Science versus Scientism debate.

The Science versus Scientism debate is really a forum for modern men of religious faith. No one else is involved; certainly no scientist has any interest in this discussion. Our faithful men debate this claim because they cannot bear a world devoid of meaning and purpose yet they refuse to forfeit their full participation in our wholly scientific world. Confronted with the crass materialism of science and the more egregious of its claims of certainty, these men desperately if not futilely grasp at the straw of cultural adulteration to preserve their admission into the scientific clubs of academia. In this view, science as the pure quest for knowledge of the strictly physical world suffered enough at the hands of the faithfuls’ Medieval predecessors. Science has proven itself the victor in the material sphere. Any evil attached to science is a product of the culture’s perversion of science into something it is not, we are told reassuringly.

But, having granted science that domain, these men of faith push back by attempting to create a bogeyman which they warn Science must stay away from to preserve its perfection in its limited role as the final expositor of the physical. The new evil one is Scientism. Scientism is the cult-like pagan religion which worships science and gives it powers of knowledge and certainty, creating the illusion that science reigns supreme over all of man’s affairs – including faith. For the modern man of religion, the bogeyman of Scientism is the source of all of the problems between science and religious faith. It is the “belief” in the omniscience of science — not science proper — we take issue with, they say.

If science is a religion, it stands on no better ground than our religious faith and we can challenge it on our terms. But science proper, these men continue, does not aspire to dominate man’s search for truth. For example, science does not tell us anything about the Creator of the first quark of energy nor does it answer what happens to the soul of man, his self-awareness, his consciousness of being, when the body retires to its dusty source. Science is redeemable because in its pure state it claims no ultimate jurisdiction over anything but the corporeal and it recognizes that it cannot deal with or disprove the rest of what we have given ourselves to in faith.

But this defense of science fails on two grounds. One, it is not what science itself says or does in real life. There is no Scientism. It is wholly made up by these religious men to avoid confronting science. Put bluntly, science as something other than Scientism does not exist as an empirical fact.

(Parenthetically, it is not unlike the way the West now confronts the evil of Islam. To argue that Islam is an evil ideology in and of itself is not possible in our day for precisely the reasons science is what these men say it is not. But it is possible to create out of whole cloth a radical version of Islam called “Islamism.” Islamism can be called evil not because of an idea – which is but another man’s debatable belief and therefore not condemnable – but because it denies the methodologies democracy has developed to deal with the radical uncertainty of every human affair outside of science. Islamism is evil because its assault on the methodology of democracy is evil, not because the Islam which inspires it is evil. And so it is with Scientism. Science is not the problem; but using science to destroy religious faith is the evil and this our modern men of religious faith call Scientism.)

In addition to the fact that scientism does not actually exist in the world, the science versus Scientism divide is also wrong because it misunderstands the basis of modern science.

To get at this basis, we must begin with the post-Enlightenment view of man. In this view, certainty and knowledge is resident only in the approach to the world which reduces everything to a mathematical proportion, equation, or formula. This seemingly simple step “forward” from the Greek view of Logos or Reason (what was termed “science”) is all it took to destroy the world of revelation and reason, where previous to its destruction nothing existed without telos or purpose or Divine Providence.

With the Enlightenment’s mathematically grounded scientific revolution — made possible through Descartes’ “contribution” of the Cogito and all that comes with it (i.e., figurate extension, metaphysical matter, Pure Intellect, the Instant, and local motion) — the Divine and man’s experience of the Divine ground of Being were literally hollowed out of the World. The fuller exposition of this, as intimated above, necessitating the use of language to describe an experience of being no longer ontological, would itself require the enlistment of soul or Reason no longer available but to the rarest of men, and even then, only at the rarest of times. Such exposition, however, is on its way as I have said here and on previous occasions, and we await its publication by the Institute of Advanced Strategic & Political Studies. But in the interim, nothing prevents us from viewing its effect in the world and on man.

Thus, the new scientist, using a modern mathematical reasoning, took the world of man and reduced it to the symbols of the mathesis universalis. Once everything in the world including man had become mere formulae, infinite proportions of relative quantities, the physical world became manageable and malleable. The era of the Progress of science was ushered in.

But to get there, the world had lost everything of value (literally so), for it had lost its Divine ground of Being. Things were now merely equations and measurements. In the new science, speech as symbol was no longer about real things but mathematical symbols that generated yet additional abstractions. Telos and ordering had been replaced by quantities and proportions that could be mathematically manipulated by Method. Methodologies of the mathematics flourished as the great mathematical and scientific minds bounded onto center stage in the world of man’s affairs. Logos — Reason and Speech – the experience of Telos and order as ranking was now a thing of the past.

In truth, the Reason of philosophy (meaning Socrates-Plato-Aristotle) and even the world of religious faith – where revelation granted man a glimpse of the Divine Plan and Purpose – did not disappear. But what happened was even worse. With the advent of the new reason of science, having achieved certain knowledge through its ratiocinations and methodologies, all of Man’s existence outside of the realm of science was relegated to the trash bin of uncertainty. Philosophy, Reason, religious faith had all been reduced to the world of subjective opinion. One man’s virtue was now another man’s sin.

In the modern world, Reason was now the new science of ratiocination. This new reason (now just mathematical method) and its claim of absolute and exclusive certainty did not merely occupy some part of man’s world; it forcefully displaced the whole of it by reducing the Whole to the Part. So what man once understood of and experienced as the whole of his existence – his very being as represented by the Terms of Existence, Self-soul, Society, G-d, and World — was now “completed” or made whole by the Part. The Part that completed the Whole was that part of the World subject to man’s mathematical calculations – the wholly material. What was left over of human existence, the crumbs of religious faith and philosophy, was now mere belief – one man’s opinion pitted against another’s equally valid opinion because they were equally uncertain. Knowledge or truth was no longer available to these opinions except in their surrender to the method of democracy. Method would replace the uncertainty of a political order that knew only radically equal opposing beliefs.

And hence we arrive at the defense of Science in the Science versus Scientism distinction.

It is not, as many good and religious men suggest today, that this new science morphed from a valid and ontologically neutral tool of mankind into the “modern religion” or cultural ideology of scientism. The proponents of this view would suggest that science itself requires no a priori reduction of man and his experience of the world to the Part. The Whole of human existence remains, including its Divine ground of Being. Science properly applied is just the examination of the Part; the Whole remains whole.

But this is mere romance fiction and has little to do with science proper. Leaving aside the “philosophic” basis of modern science enabled by Descartes, addressed in a study begun by Jacob Klein in the 1930s (published by MIT in English in 1968) and recast and completed by Loewenberg in his soon to be published précis, science itself demands its world to be the exclusive domain of certain knowledge. Even Klein, a defender of modern science to be sure, was pressed to remark that Descartes left matters “ontologically unclarified.”

While its theories and laboratory results remain tentative to the scientific purist who takes his science seriously and who knows neither theory nor experimental measurements are without some measure of uncertainty, the mathematical method upon which all science rests is without any uncertainty. It must contain the Whole of existence or it cannot speak to any of it given its starting point in the pure abstractions of the mathematical symbols.

And this is so because it is in its main operation a product of what Descartes termed man’s pure intellect. Crassly put, a thing in the real world can be reduced to a mathematical formula using numbers to represent its relationship (i.e., proportions) to other things. Once so reduced, the numeric symbols can be replaced by further abstractions or letter variables to explore and establish yet other relationships.

But this very abstraction to symbols ONLY works if real things can in fact be so reduced. To the scientist, the green blade of grass does not exist as a green blade of grass to serve a purpose in creation. Instead, the color green itself is reduced to a mathematical formula representing some physical part of light, itself reduced to a formula. Man’s phenomenological experience of “green” as qualitatively different from “red” is nothing more than the brain with its bio-electrical actions, reactions and transactions arbitrarily dividing up the light spectrum. The grass itself has no purpose within the master plan of creation and it most certainly has no relationship to man as such. The grass exists because of natural selection and is reducible to its biological and molecular components existing as formulae of yet more proportional magnitudes themselves consisting of essential particles of matter illustrated and symbolized by yet other equations representing yet more magnitudinal proportions.

To the scientist, there is nothing real about any qualitative differences or ordering in the world; the only reality – the only existence – is the magnitudes or quantities of things in relation to other things. And as you can now understand quite conclusively, once the world is reduced to magnitudes, everything is radically comparable and of the same order or value only separated by magnitudes of quantities.

At best, natural selection worked with chance to establish perceived distinctions of order or value in man’s world but they don’t actually exist. Because quite simply if they did, if the world were not reducible to the formulaic magnitudes of quantity but instead retained some other quality, the most fundamental assumption about the world which provides mathematical physics with whatever claim it has to methodological certainty, and therefore to “scientific certainty,” would be rendered meaningless. In other words, if the quantitative proportions expressed in the formulae do not capture everything at work in the thing symbolically represented, the equation fails to represent anything real or symbolic.

To test this, start with the simple statement. Man is not reducible to his physical parts, neither the sum of the collection of individual physical parts nor the whole of the physical parts. If that were true, there could be no modern science of man. It would render the whole enterprise to measure and to deduce relationships between magnitudes of quantifiable things suspect and tentative at best if not demonstrably false. But because the scientist begins with the a priori certainty that he can reduce man to proportional magnitudes in the same way he does a rock or a light beam, he knows that his mathematical methodologies are certain and the prayers of man to the Divine are but figments and illusions.

Don’t misunderstand. Many a scientist will tell you that there might be great purpose in these figments and illusions. They are most assuredly a product of natural selection. Their future, however, at least in their present form, is in doubt if their present status has not already been fatally challenged. Thus, when the scientist is able to create an “out-of-body experience” by merely sending an electric current to a certain part of the brain, he is certain that once he is able to reduce the brain and the bio-chemical currents racing across the one trillion synapses of the brain to the proper equations he will have mapped out the mind and self of this man. The soul will have finally been chained and mated permanently to the corporeal body and left to suffer the same mortal fate as its mate.

As two of the most renown scientists in their respective fields, Professors Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, and Steven Pinker, a cognitive neuroscientist, made clear in their dialogue a few years back, all scientists per force agree that man’s soul is all but dead and gone, if by soul one means a connection with the divine. If by soul you mean some high intellectual activity or aesthetic feeling created out of biochemical actions in the brain reducible to equations of proportional magnitudes, then the soul is alive and well. In other more blunt words, Man reduced to the Part can still be soulful in the sense that he is far more complicated and imaginative than a jackass due again to natural selection and chance; but at the end of the day he remains only magnitudes (not orders of rank) apart from the ass.

Granting this scientific dialogue some license, let’s permit the advocates of science to speak for themselves and at fair length. Dawkins set the stage for the entire dialogue when he addressed the title of the day’s affair:

Is science killing the soul? This is a cunning title, because it cunningly mixes two different meanings of soul. The first and oldest meaning of soul, which I'm going to call Soul One, takes off from one set of definitions. I'm going to quote several related definitions from the Oxford dictionary:

"The principle of life in man or animals — animate existence."

"The principle of thought and action in man commonly regarded as an entity distinct from the body, the spiritual part of man in contrast to the purely physical."

"The spiritual part of man regarded as surviving after death, and as susceptible of happiness or misery in a future state."

"The disembodied spirit of a deceased person regarded as a separate entity and as invested with some amount of form and personality."

So Soul One refers to a particular theory of life. It's the theory that there is something non-material about life, some non-physical vital principle. It's the theory according to which a body has to be animated by some anima. Vitalized by a vital force. Energized by some mysterious energy. Spiritualized by some mysterious spirit. Made conscious by some mysterious thing or substance called consciousness. You'll notice that all those definitions of Soul One are circular and non-productive. It's no accident. Julian Huxley once satirically likened vitalism to the theory that a railway engine works by "force-locomotif." I don't always agree with Julian Huxley, but here he hit the nail beautifully. In the sense of Soul One, science has either killed the soul or is in the process of doing so.

But there is a second sense of soul, Soul Two, which takes off from another one of the Oxford dictionary's definitions:

"Intellectual or spiritual power. High development of the mental faculties. Also, in somewhat weakened sense, deep feeling, sensitivity."

In this sense, our question tonight means, Is science killing soulfulness? Is it killing esthetic sensitivity, artistic sensibility, creativity? The answer to this question, Is science killing Soul Two?, is a resounding No. The very opposite is the case. . . .

In the sense of Soul Two, science doesn't kill the soul; it gives the soul constant and exhilarating re-birth.

Turning back to Soul One — in the first chapter of Steve Pinker's book How the Mind Works he says, "I want to convince you that our minds are not animated by some godly vapor or single wonder-principle. The mind, like the Apollo spacecraft, is designed to solve many engineering problems, and thus is packed with high-tech systems, each contrived to overcome its own obstacles." In the same paragraph, he moves on to Soul Two when he says, " . . . I believe that the discovery by cognitive science and artificial intelligence of the technical challenges overcome by our mundane mental activity is one of the great revelations of science, an awakening of the imagination comparable to learning that the universe is made up of billions of galaxies or that a drop of pond water teems with microscopic life." Well, awakening of the imagination is a pretty good definition of Soul Two. And in that sense, far from killing the soul, science may prove to be its greatest awakener.

Carl Sagan wrote, shortly before he died,

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

Well it's common enough for people to agree that religions have got the facts all wrong, but "Nevertheless," they go on to say, "you have to admit that religions do provide something that people need. We crave a deeper meaning to life, a deeper, more imaginative understanding of the mystery of existence." Well, in the passage I've just quoted, Sagan seems to be criticizing religions not just for getting it wrong, which many people would accept, but for their deficiencies precisely in the sphere in which they are supposed to retain some residual virtue. Religions are not imaginative, not poetic, not soulful. On the contrary, they are parochial, small-minded, niggardly with the human imagination, precisely where science is generous.

Scientists are by force of their education, training, and world view almost entirely incapable of a philosophic thought. But one should not fault them for this. What Dawkins and Pinker cannot explain, or at least explain well, and you can read their entire dialogue on the death of the soul and you will not find it, is what most scientists as men of the new science, mere ratiocinators, have a hard time explaining. And it is this.

If the scientist were to accept at any level that a man’s self is inseparable from the Whole of a man’s existence, including the Transcendent ground of Being, or that a man’s self was not wholly contained within the formulae of proportional magnitudes known or possibly to be known, science by its own terms would not work. And this is understood clearly if you have followed what I have said until now. The fundamental “philosophic” (more appropriately “anti-philosophic”) axiom of modern science is that man, the Whole of his existence, is completed in the Part. The Part is that part of human existence reducible to proportional magnitudes. Quantities. This is fundamental to the entire enterprise because without it you could not use mathematical physics to usefully describe the world. Without it, science would appear to the lamest of men and to the most rational to be nothing more than random calculations, or at best gross approximations, generated by a computer.

But science is in our day manifestly not that. Science works. We know it does. We fly; we compute; we clone. But it is possible to say that it works because Cartesian science introduced to the West the idea that a man’s Pure Intellect aided by his imagination was able through the mathesis universalis to symbolize the truth of existence. The Truth of Existence was no longer bound by the Terms of Existence. All was reducible to one thing. Literally. They even give it a name. The Big Bang.

Dawkins cleverly anticipates the modern religious man’s effort to make peace with science by “outing” scientism. The good professor forecloses any breaking of the scientific ranks in his concluding remarks:

Now, there are, of course, many unsolved problems, and scientists are the first to admit this. There are aspects of human subjective consciousness that are deeply mysterious. Neither Steve Pinker nor I can explain human subjective consciousness — what philosophers call qualia. In How the Mind Works Steve elegantly sets out the problem of subjective consciousness, and asks where it comes from and what's the explanation. Then he's honest enough to say, "Beats the heck out of me." That is an honest thing to say, and I echo it. We don't know. We don't understand it.

To this point what Dawkins has done is to set up the fall guy. The theory we have explained, the science = certainty / all else = uncertainty obversion or reciprocal, does not suggest in the least that science claims to know all of the corporeal world and indeed it could accept that it will never know all. The certainty is in the assertion that only that which is subject to mathematical physics is knowable and worth knowing because G-d, the soul, philosophy, Reason, free will, love, faith, patriotism are all mere figments if they cannot be reduced to a proportional magnitude, a mathematical equation. That something real exists in the corporeal world that man and his science might never discover is just another way of saying that man’s mathematical physics might remain less than complete. But, that does not mean to say or suggest that the completion of the last mathematical equation does not exist. So he continues:

There's a cheap debating trick which implies that if, say, science can't explain something, this must mean that some other discipline can. If scientists suspect that all aspects of the mind have a scientific explanation but they can't actually say what that explanation is yet, then of course it's open to you to doubt whether the explanation ever will be forthcoming. That's a perfectly reasonable doubt. But it's not legitimately open to you to substitute a word like soul, or spirit, as if that constituted an explanation. It is not an explanation, it's an evasion. It's just a name for that which we don't understand. The scientist may agree to use the word soul for that which we don't understand, but the scientist adds, "But we're working on it, and one day we hope we shall explain it." The dishonest trick is to use a word like soul or spirit as if it constituted an explanation.

Consciousness is still mysterious. And scientists, I think, all admit it. . . .

My suspicion, my hunch, my hope, is that . . . [p]robably within the next century[ ] Soul One will finally be killed, and good riddance. But in the process, Soul Two, far from being destroyed, will still be finding new worlds to conquer.

Understand that Dawkins is not suggesting that the best science can do is carry on with the suspicion, hunch, and hope that the conscious mind does not exist as anything but an illusion created by the brain. What he and his colleague are saying is that the only question is whether science will write the correct equation of proportional magnitudes to prove the conscious mind is but the manifestation of purely physical processes. Until then, science remains unchallenged in its methodological certainty that all of man is reducible to the physical sciences.

The science versus Scientism distinction is a rhetorical device for religious men who wish to reach a destination; a conclusion. These otherwise good men fail to bring with them the baggage of empirical evidence for any such distinction in fact and they lack the documentation that would suggest that science has ever or will ever be prepared to abdicate its current role as man’s sole and exclusive route to certain knowledge. The scientific train has left the station and our religious friends remain in search of the bogeyman.