Scientism: The dogma of science

Unlike the use of the scientific method as only one mode of reaching knowledge, scientism claims that science alone can render truth about the world and reality. Scientism’s single-minded adherence to only the empirical, or testable, makes it a strictly scientific worldview, in much the same way that a Protestant fundamentalism that rejects science can be seen as a strictly religious worldview.

Scientism sees it necessary to do away with most, if not all, metaphysical, philosophical, and religious claims, as the truths they proclaim cannot be apprehended by the scientific method. In essence, scientism sees science as the absolute and only justifiable access to the truth.

Scientism is the dogma that only scientific methods can generate the truth. It is dogma because the scientific method can generate the truth, but it’s a particular kind of knowledge. It reveals objective knowledge about quantities; it’s descriptive. It does not reveal any knowledge about the subjective questions of value. For that, we need other epistemology, and so intuition is another kind of knowledge.

-Amal Jacobson

Realizing the truth

“My spiritual master defines intuition by its moral and social parameters. He has not defined intuition as a superpower. It defines it through discrimination of right and wrong (Viveka) and dispassion or non-attachment(Vairagya). In which case that intuition which we make a case for other kinds of knowledge, we also have to make a case for the kind of other epistemology. Other kinds of avenues to truth. There is an avenue to quantitative descriptive, factual knowledge, and the scientific method is efficient to that.

There are also avenues to the truth that has to deal with subjective value and meaning and purpose, and that is where sadhana comes in, that’s where spiritual practice comes in. Scientism completely dogmatically dismissed it out of hand; it calls it non rational sort of faith-based exercising delusion, not modern psychiatrist especially close-minded psychiatrist will totally dismiss mystical experiences as temporal lobe seizure, and such. They cannot apologize for the spiritual experience, they are not making any room for it, and so I call this epistemological oppression. “it’s a sort of colonial project to say that only the white man knows the truth, and this is the way to know it.” Tantra is asserting an indigenous way of knowing that is a part of all human culture; you see it everywhere globally, and modern scientism has bulldozed over it. And has tempted to say that we move past the ignorances of our past and here the truth of knowledge. Still, they have not been able to craft a mythological way of relating to the cosmos that is coherent with understanding consciousness.”

Source: Amal Jacobson, Neohumanism course.