The Seven Deadly Spins--Physicalism

 Christianity has an interesting history with the study of the physical world. The Scientific Revolution took place in Western Civilization in part because of significant Christian presuppositions, such as: 1) the physical world is real and not merely an illusion, so it’s worth our time to study it; 2) it was created by God, the supreme intelligence, so it must have an orderliness to it that can be discovered; 3) the physical world was created by God but is not itself divine, thus it would not be improper to run experiments on it; and 4) God entrusted the physical world to the care of humans, so we have a mandate to gain a better understanding of it.

 But with the rise of evolutionary theory, a number of people have come to view Christianity as an impediment to our understanding of the physical world. Christianity insists that non-physical things play an important role in the world—beings like God, angels, and demons and entities like human souls. Yet the sciences have seemingly enriched our lives with or without reference to any of these things. We seem to be able to heal the human body through physical remedies like medicine and surgery with or without the use of prayer; we seem to be ever-increasing our material comforts with or without considering the will of God. To some people, then, Christianity looks like an idea that might have given people the illusion of understanding in the past but is now no longer necessary for understanding all there is to the world.

 The viewpoint I’m describing has been called physicalism. It’s the idea that the physical world is really all that exists; thus, all we would need to understand it would be the physical sciences. But physicalism leaves us with a very impoverished understanding of our own lives and the world in which we live. In fact, physicalism can’t even explain everything you’re experiencing right now as you read this newspaper! Just consider the question, “Why are these markings on the page the way they are?” Physical details certainly provide part of the explanation—the properties of the ink and paper make the markings appear a certain way and not some other way. But why are these markings arranged the way they are? Why are they arranged into patterns you recognize as letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs? And why are they arranged into these particular paragraphs and not different paragraphs? It’s because they are conveying a particular idea from my mind to yours. But an idea is not a physical thing. It has no weight (does your head get heavier when you think of a bowling ball rather than a cotton ball?). It has no taste (what does the idea behind this sentence taste like?). You can’t see an idea with your eyeballs or hear it with your eardrums, yet ideas are clearly real.

 If we believe that the physical world is really all that exists, we thus lose the ability to explain huge swaths of life. We lose the ability to explain human behavior because we have to leave human souls out of it; thus, we can’t discuss the influence of beliefs, goals, or intentions on behavior (not to mention the influence of moral realities like sin and righteousness). Nor can we fully explain the physical world on this viewpoint. Many of our questions about physical things would have to end with the answer, “There is no reason for it—it just is the way it is.”

 Christianity gives us the resources to have a much richer and more complete understanding of the world and ourselves. It reminds us that there are physical and non-physical components to our lives and the world around us, so we should seek to understand both and how they interact. Doing so will help us understand our lives, the problems we encounter, and how they can potentially be resolved.

The Seven Deadly Spins--Scientism

 “That’s just your opinion!” This phrase has become the rhetorical trump card in our society today. If someone makes a claim you don’t like, rather than go to all the trouble of proving that their claim is false, you can instead label their claim as an opinion and thereby escape from any pressure to believe it. After all, opinions really are just beliefs that flow out of personal perspective or preference. I’m not obligated to hold your opinions and you’re not obligated to hold mine. If someone claims to know something, however, that’s a different ballgame. Knowledge is based on facts that anyone can sort through for themselves, so if you can show me that the facts of a matter are such and such, then I can’t dismiss your claim as mere opinion. I either have to agree with your claim or show that you’ve misunderstood the facts (I can also withhold judgment until I’ve had a chance to think it through, but I can’t reasonably say you’re wrong without showing why).

 Why do I mention all of this? To highlight that it makes a big difference where you draw the line between matters that can be known and matters that can only be opinion. In our society today, there’s a tendency to believe that the only matters that can be known are the matters studied by the physical sciences—geology, biology, astronomy, chemistry, physics, etc. This mindset essentially argues that if you can’t weigh it, dissect it, dissolve it, etc., then you can’t really know anything about it—you can only form opinions about it. This view has been called “scientism” because it claims the realm of knowledge entirely for the physical sciences and relegates everything else to the realm of opinion.

 Notice how scientism relegates a huge swath of human experience and inquiry to being nothing more than opinion. Claims about history? They can only be opinions according to scientism (unless perhaps some detail of the claim can be weighed or measured). Thoughts about what is morally good for humans? Mere opinions. Religious or political views? Nothing more than personal preferences (again, unless some detail of them can be quantified in some way). Thus, scientism leaves us knowing—well, not much of anything about life in general.

 Why should we reject scientism? The first and best reason is that it is self-defeating; it doesn’t pass the very test that it offers for truth. Consider its core claim: only the physical sciences can give us knowledge. That very claim is not the product of any science; it is a philosophical claim. To put it another way, no one has ever dissected a frog and found that claim lying in the pan when he was done! No one has ever mixed solutions in a test tube only to have that claim come spilling out as the product of a chemical reaction. The claim cannot be proven true by science, yet science is the only proving ground allowed by scientism. Thus, the claim that only science can give us knowledge cannot possibly be true.

 A second reason is that it leaves us ignorant of vitally important aspects of life. Consider the nature of love. We all have a good idea of what it looks like to treat someone with love rather than hatred. In other words, we all know something of the essence of love. But if scientism is true, we couldn’t truly know anything about the essence of love since love is not a thing that can be weighed on a scale, examined under a microscope, etc. If the cost of embracing scientism is giving up our knowledge of love, then the price is far too steep to pay.

 The physical sciences have provided an incredible boon to our knowledge of the world in general. We enjoy benefits every day from discoveries that have been made in these fields. Yet to say that they and they alone can give us knowledge of the world is not an advancement—it is a regression, one that, if embraced, leaves us quite ignorant of the world, of ourselves, and of our Creator and Savior.