mysterious and charged with transcendental meaning.
In addition to being mentally and spiritually stimulating and restorative,
nature is also a treasure-house of practical uses, which are discovered,
investigated and drawn out of it by means of science. Modern medical science,
especially, is something I am very, very thankful for.
Science deals with things that are real and tangible, and it provides a method
for gaining objective knowledge of nature’s order, demonstrating and applying
it. It also stirs the imagination and inspires a sense of wonder, especially at
its theoretical edges; think of the human genome project, relativity, quantum
theory, and artificial intelligence, for example. And evolution.
Scientism, however, is not science, but a mania fostered by materialism.
This is an important distinction. Scientism is to science what materialism is to
matter, and idolatry to religion.
Like any heresy, scientism takes something true and useful, and corrupts
it by separating it from its context in the whole spectrum of human thought
and blowing it out of proportion. In so doing, scientism turns science, which is
based on knowledge and reason, on its head, turning it into an obsession and
the stuff of magic. It seems paradoxical, but actually isn’t, that in the spiritual
world those who ascribe all things to nature incline toward magic. (Heaven
and Hell 488.3)
(WEO)
the new idolatry
The pagans of old worshiped nature; in our age, as belief in God wanes and the
belief that nature is everything increases, the worship of science has blossomed.
Other churches may be declining, but the Church of Science is growing.
Scientism is perhaps an even worse form of idolatry than that of the
ancients. They were ignorant of the natural causes of things, so there was a
degree of innocence in their idolatry. Furthermore, all things in nature do
represent aspects of the Divine. The wiser of the ancients were not worshiping
nature per se, but were responding to the reflections of the Divine they
perceived in it.
Our modern worship of science and technology, though, is a step further
removed from genuine worship than the ancient worship of nature was.
Scientism is the worship of human intelligence, and is thus a form of self-
worship.
Science as a tool, rather than as an idol, is a wonderful thing, a truly useful
product of human reason. There is much to be learned from the scientific
study of nature. But to worship nature, rather than the God who created it,
and to make science into a religion, is simply the latest form of the oldest of all
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