“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.
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