EVERYTHING'S FAITH=BASED:

Scientism is the idea that science alone, gives us objective knowledge ie that science alone reliably exposes the world to us as it actually is. Edward Feser in his Book Scholastic Metaphysics argues that there are "no good arguments whatsoever for scientism, and decisive arguments against it."

Rather, he claims that ancient scholastic metaphysics, typified by Thomas Aquinas, has much more to say about how the world actually is than natural science.

He argues that the idea that "the methods of science are the only reliable way to secure knowledge of anything" is not itself a scientific claim that can be established with the scientific method. How could such statement be tested?

Surely the statement is not a scientific statement but a philosophical one. It's truth or falsehood cannot be tested in a laboratory but the philosopher would certainly have something to say about it.

Feser points out that the scientific method relies on a number of philosophical assumptions: that there is an objective world external to the minds of scientists, that this world is governable by regularities of the sort that can be captured in scientific laws and that human perception can uncover and describe these regularities.

It is therefore absurd to state that the only way we can know about the world is through scientific speculation since this activity is dependent upon assumptions that are not established by science. The argument is circular.

This should be the death knell of scientism, but there is more.

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