344 RELIGION, MORALITY, FAITH, AND REASONlike “idiosyncratic, arbitrary taste and sentiment”).^1 This view is
neither justified nor workable. Regarding morality: either murderers,
child molesters, slaveholders, and drug dealers act wrongly, or they do
not. If they do, then laws against them are justified. If they don’t – if all
there is to acting “rightly” or “wrongly” is “acting in a way privately
but arbitrarily liked by some person or group” or “acting in a way
privately but arbitrarily disliked by some person or group” – then laws
against murder, etc. are also without any justification. Private
sentiments are not rightly publicly enforced. Regarding religion: either
God exists or God does not exist; either nirvana can be achieved or not.
If God exists, God is either trinitarian or not. These things are so, or not
so, independent of what anyone thinks. An omnicompetent deity, no less
than the planet Pluto or the Green Bay Packers football team, either
exists independent of our thoughts, or not.
Scientism
A standard reply is that while perhaps this is so, no one can tell whether
God exists or not, so there are just opinions and feelings about such
matters. This reply typically is based on the idea that we can only know
what science can tell us. The reply is particularly ill-founded, since We
can only know what science can tell us is not something science can tell
us, so if the reply were sound it would itself be just a matter of the
opinion and feelings of those who offered it. It may be worthwhile to
put this point fully and formally, if briefly, as follows.
Scientism holds:
1 All explanation is scientific explanation.Note that 1 is not itself justifiable by appeal to science alone; it is a view
in theory of knowledge or epistemology – a piece of philosophy, not a
piece of science, which neither presupposes it nor otherwise requires it.
At this point it is useful to make a simplifying assumption to the effect
that:
2 All scientific explanation is explanation in physics.Almost certainly false, this is the view of traditional believers in the
unity of science; if one wishes, one can replace “physics” in this
argument by something like “physics, chemistry, biochemistry, biology,
geology, and geography” or even by “natural science.”