After reading a dire piece at the National Public Radio (NPR) website about novelist Marilynne Robinson and her continuing beef about “scientism”, I think I’ve finally figured out why atheists are constantly accused of this behavior. When we’re said to be guilty of “scientism”, it’s not intended to mean that atheists or scientists are cold, unfeeling rationalists, blind to the beauty and wonder of this world. Nor does it mean that we employ science in every interaction we have with the world, including viewing art, being in love, and so on. Nobody with eyes to see could support such an accusation. Scientists are a well read group (I still maintain that we read far more novels than English professors read science books), have families and fulfilling relationships, and many of us, like Sagan and Dawkins, are outspoken about the beauty we find in our work and our world.

No, when used as a derogatory adjective, “scientism” means this:

the practice of applying rationality and standards of evidence to faith.

For religious people and accommodationists, that practice is a no-no. That’s why the adjective is pejorative.

“Scientism”, then, is a religious code word in the same sense that “spirituality” is code for “feelings of transcendence that should be considered religious.” Perhaps I’m belaboring the obvious.

Robinson, a superb novelist (I much enjoyed Housekeeping and Gilead, which nabbed a Pulitzer), is also religious—a Congregationalist who sometimes preaches at her church. And she’s been on a crusade against atheism, writing and speaking about it often—and always connecting it with scientism. Her new book, Absence of Mind (I haven’t read it) continues this critique; the Yale University Press describes it as “ challeng[ing] postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science.” Yep, that’s nasty us, asking for evidence. But what is a “postmodern” atheist?

Marcelo Gleiser’s NPR piece, engagingly titled “Can scientists overreach?” (the answer of course is “yes”), is merely regurgitation and adulation of Robinson’s views. (Gleiser is a physics professor at Dartmouth.)

Robinson is particularly critical of fundamentalist scientism as preached by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker, among others. The reading is tough, but well worth it.

“Fundamental scientism”? Is that what characterizes “postmodern atheism”?

This, in a nutshell, is the crux of her argument: Science paints a wonderful picture of the world, but a necessarily incomplete one. To reduce everything to science and its methods impoverishes humanity. We need cultural diversity and that includes the culture of religion.

Of course I agree that we need cultural diversity, but I’m not on board with an aspect of cultural diversity that endorses lies, enables superstition, or propagandizes children. Gleiser goes on:

What makes some scientists so sure of their science? The practice of science, after all, relies precisely on uncertainties; a theory only works until its limits are exposed. In fact, this is a good thing, since new theories sprout from the cracks of old ones. For science to advance it needs to fail. The truths of today will not be the truths of tomorrow. So, asks Robinson, whence comes this certainty? She goes on to examine several cases, pointing out their weaknesses. Essentially, scientists shouldn’t be making sweeping generalizations based on their science alone.

Religionists’ claim that scientists are arrogant always amuses me. Really, who are the arrogant ones? Scientists are nearly always tentative in their conclusions. Lately I’ve been reading a bunch of papers on evolution, and was struck by how often conclusions are qualified by words like “this suggests that” or “this conclusion should be regarded as provisional”. Many papers suggest additional lines of research that could support or falsify their conclusions. In the end, it is religious people who are the certain ones, the overbearing ones. How often do you hear, in religious discourse, that “my conclusion that there is god should, of course, be seen as provisional, subject to refutation by findings of unjustifiable evil,” or “maybe there’s a heaven, but maybe not; I don’t have much evidence.” If they relied at all on evidence, the faithful wouldn’t be able to say anything.

And it’s bogus to suggest that all scientific truth is ephemeral, for some truths of today will remain truths of tomorrow. A water molecule will still have two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom; AIDS will still be caused by a virus; the Earth will still go around the Sun. Although the concept of absolute and unchangeable truth is alien to science, we’ve found out a lot of things that are likely to remain “true” in that they’re unlikely to be overturned. In her postmodern claim that scientific “evidence” is weak and changeable, Robinson clearly intends to denigrate science by showing that, after all, it’s not so different from religion. (Perhaps she doesn’t remember that she is religious?) Robinson sees other similarities as well: science, like religion, can be used for bad ends:

In 2006, Robinson wrote a scathing review of Dawkins’s The God Delusion for Harper’s Magazine, “Hysterical Scientism: The Ecstasy of Richard Dawkins.” “So bad science is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion. That both of them can do damage on a huge scale is clear. The prestige of both is a great part of the problem, and in the modern period the credibility of anything called science is enormous. As the history of eugenics proves, science at the highest levels is no reliable corrective to the influence of cultural prejudice but is in fact profoundly vulnerable to it.” . . .

. . . I also quote her last words: “It is diversity that makes any natural system robust, and diversity that stabilizes culture against the eccentricity and arrogance that have so often called themselves reason and science.”

According to this theory, Scandinavia should be far less “robust” than America or, indeed, Saudi Arabia. But the opposite is true. As Greg Paul has shown, there’s actually a negative correlation between the religiosity of a society and sociological indices of its well being. That doesn’t prove that religion destabilizes society, but it does suggest that unstable and dysfunctional societies become religious in a defensive way—either to find succor in a celestial sky-father or as a circling of the wagons, an ingroup-outgroup stance that one assumes when feeling beleaguered.

It’s really sad that a brilliant novelist like Robinson uses her brainpower to denigrate science in a public attempt to buttress her faith. At the end, Gleiser parrot’s Robinson’s accommodationism:

Frontal attacks on religion and its practices will only produce more animosity. Fundamentalism leads to further entrenchment, not to conciliation. Perhaps a better approach is to teach science as it truly functions, constantly engaged in a two-way exchange with the culture of its time.

Perhaps a better approach is to teach religion as it truly functions, constantly engaged in lying to children and retooling its dogma as science and secular morality advance. Why do we need conciliation?