Scientism and Its Denial of Ignorance
Dear beloved of God, let us now turn our gaze to that shadow which looms forever over modern thought: arrogance. Not the arrogance in this or another certainty per se, but the arrogance through denial of our ignorance. They would have ignorance itself as something to be solved, rather than acknowledged as our basic state, and capable of being completely solved in understandings through the temporal material. This is the heart of scientism, which declares that all mysteries are merely waiting to be decoded, and that the human being is capable of mastering every corner of existence mere through his sense perceptions, which are imperfect (insert transhumanist arguments here).
What does this arrogance look like in practice? It manifests as a refusal to admit that there are questions beyond our reach. When scientists dismiss metaphysical inquiry as “unscientific,” they are not seeking truth, but they are attempting to assert dominion over all truth, which is absurd. The foundation to metaphysical philosophy is this understanding we cannot see all, least of all our origins, like an eye trying to see its own optic nerve. They claim to have the final answer, even when their answers are built on assumptions that cannot be verified, but they do have matching mathematical equations which are neat indeed, but still far from proofs. When such philosophies deny God officially, however, they set themselves up for investiture in the material, and all becomes about the bottomline as they worship compromise itself, rather than the contention upon which knowledge can be honestly built. This is the danger of such godless arrogance: a prison, where seekers of truth become trapped by the very certainty they would claim to reject. Silence can sharpen us or offer escape, one is of the spirit and the other of the material and pleasure, the passions, falling for promise of wealth. Prayer is where our thoughts and actions are weighed.
Consider the group of blind men approaching an elephant. Without vision, they each touch a different part of the animal, and then insist that this must represent what an elephant is. Arrogance refuses the whole picture. So too do many modern thinkers, who cling to narrow frameworks of understanding while dismissing the broader truths that lie beyond their grasp. The result is not enlightenment, but intellectual myopia, one that leaves us blind to the very questions we should be asking.
The strange irony in this arrogance: it is predictable. For every claim of mastery over truth, there arises another question that cannot be answered by reason alone. The more we demand perfection from our knowledge, the more we expose its fragility. This is why scientism is such a tangle of contradictions, its followers are the architects of their own captive ideas of progress and therefore prisoners within their own blueprints.
What does this mean for faith? It means that humility is more than just another virtue, and is a setting of being spread across the virtues in SVT (structural virtues theory). To deny our ignorance is to deny God’s gift of grace, which operates beyond our boundaries of being. When we reject appropriate humility given our standing and perspective in favour of arrogance, we can not advance knowledge in any aspect, and we are closing ourselves off from meaning in the very grace that makes any real knowledge possible.
Nothing is more worthy of conquering than the self, and nothing worth less to you than the unconquered self. Carved by struggle and pain, all that is good about you is what could not yet be stripped away from you, either pure or guarded by us against the force attempting to shape us into the likeness of God’s Son, losing that which is unworthy. We are to be made always new in the flame of God’s Love, refined in faith as crafted into eternity. You cannot rise from a tomb you refuse to see yourself in, nor live until you learn to rather die in yourself constantly.
So are you seeking truth, or seeking to assert your dominance over it? Do you crucify yourself or Christ Jesus all over again? Will you carry your cross or be destroyed with your sin where and in which state you did not need to be, clutching your favourite “things”? One choice is wisdom, the other is the trap of limiting self-deception.