The view of reality created by scientism is that of “bits of stuff pushing each other around in a void”. Such a worldview not only flies in the face of contemporary physics, chemistry and biology, and is therefore wholly unscientific, it is also a worldview that is actually based on religion, argues philosopher and Žižek collaborator, John Milbank. To overcome the disenchantment and lack of meaning this worldview creates, Milbank argues we must rediscover the natural magic of the universe and see science as part of a poetic project.

In the world of today, only science is held to be sacred. It is regarded as the holy guardian of “fact” and all legitimate public imperatives are increasingly supposed to be derived from “fact,” with everything else belonging to a domain of private freedom in which we are free to range within a playground of private and ungrounded preferences.

Of course, the boundary between these two domains is endlessly contested, and increasingly it is also blurred. What we are allowed to do on our own should also refer to established “fact,” as with dieting and exercise and so forth; increasingly, we are being compelled even to live and sleep our individual lives according to “scientific” measure. Conversely, the same measure is vastly expanding the sphere of private choice, providing we stick to the prescribed procedures. This includes an increasing ability and encouragement to alter and enhance our own bodies.

SUGGESTED READING Life's mysteries cannot be explained away, they are to be lived By Orfeas Chasapis Tassinis As to the public sphere of political and economic consensus, here most of all the “scientific” holds sway. This vision of reality is held to mean that we are (somehow) entirely detached surveyors of nature, whose gaze upon her ought to be objective. That gaze discovers her to be meaningless, with “meaning” being something dreamt up by poets or schoolgirl influencers. All that is true about her is that she contains bits of stuff in an empty void at various infinitesimally varying sizes from inconceivably minute to inconceivably large, which shove each other around. Insofar as we can mimetically imitate these processes, we discover “truths” which are commensurate with our power.

The aim of every polity should be to fund this experimental research and to apply it to the social realm: endlessly to expand and reduce things, make them go ever faster and ever slower; make ever more exact images of these processes and transmit these images at ever faster or artificially delayed rates. This “product” is also a spectacle that is in itself a further product. Whether we are capitalists or socialists, the great aim is to increase such productivity.

Of course, it is difficult to admit that, from the outset of Francis Bacon’s seventeenth-century project to pursue knowledge via experimental method in order to wield power over nature, what we now call “science” was inherently technology and measured by technology. The sociologist Robert K. Merton showed in the early twentieth century that the Industrial Revolution was as old as the scientific one, revealing science as intertwined with technological innovation from the outset rather than a purely knowledge-based endeavor. Nonetheless, our historians still choose to ignore his evidence concerning seventeenth-century England.

___

The mysteries of human behaviour are dealt with by the largely pseudo-science of psychology—as if the workings of our mind (as opposed to the life-inducing “soul” which we share with animals and perhaps plants) could be reduced to affective impulses scarcely under our control, but not beyond the reach of chemical and social stimulants.

___

Since, however, humans cannot live by technology alone, we continue to ask ourselves metaphysical questions about meaning. The typical answers given to these questions expose scientism as ideology in their freewheeling and unabashed speculation.

The mysteries of genealogical causation are reduced to confident newspaper statements as to why such and such a characteristic of humans, especially gendered behaviour, has evolved—these statements carrying no more weight of evidence than just-so stories.

The mysteries of human behaviour are dealt with by the largely pseudo-science of psychology—as if the workings of our mind (as opposed to the life-inducing “soul” which we share with animals and perhaps plants) could be reduced to affective impulses scarcely under our control, but not beyond the reach of chemical and social stimulants.

To entertain a real science of mind would inevitably be to admit the reality of spirit, since nothing material is able to account for consciousness, the self-reflective character of reason, the reality of free will, and the human recognition of meaning and value, along with the experience of love. And yet it is obvious that, if these things are all illusions, then the basis of our ethics and our democracy is likewise illusory.

The wisest heads, like R.G. Collingwood, long ago warned that a scientistic philosophy supporting such an outlook necessarily paves the way for populism and fascism. For if the elite eschews the quest for deepened meaning, then unscrupulous deceivers will claim to take it up.

___

The wisest heads, like R.G. Collingwood, long ago warned that a scientistic philosophy supporting such an outlook necessarily paves the way for populism and fascism.

___

Given the reality of spirit, the mass of people instinctively reject control by a purely “scientific” elite because, as with the handling of the Covid crisis, they realise that a supposed appeal to the facts tends to favour the tight coercive control of populations by “experts,” as if people too were simply bits of stuff. The same appeal disguises the way in which there are usually only selective facts available, which cannot displace the need for political choices based upon debatable values. In the same way, the endless quest for production as such suppresses the question of what to produce and the existence of desirable goals other than GDP: beauty, creativity, exploring nature, political participation, meditation, and so forth.

Yet to say all this is by no means to indict science as such.

Just to the contrary, little in modern physics, and increasingly in modern chemistry and biology, supports the “bits of stuff pushing each other around in a void” perspective. For a very long time now, matter has evaporated into energy, and mechanism into fields of forces and processes that appear more habitual than law-governed. And yet some scientists, besides laypeople, still encourage a reductive image of science fostered originally in the seventeenth century.

Even in this period, the deeper thinkers, like Francis Bacon himself, realised that nature must include creatures who can think and feel, and who invent artefacts and ultimately investigate nature herself. And yet a more dualistic view of mind and matter prevailed, somewhat under the influence of Descartes, just as Newton’s astounding discovery of a mathematical “law” for gravity encouraged the notion that nature consisted of invariant mechanical processes, even though gravity itself is not a mechanism.

How did this come about? Eventually, such a perspective appealed to atheists, often because it secretly opened a prospect of an entirely manipulable society, whereby they, as a new elite, could control more ignorant human beings. And yet originally it was much enabled by a certain type of religious outlook (especially Puritans and Augustinians) which hoped to get rid of the last vestiges of what was perceived as “pagan” enchantment and “magical” sacramentality—thereby reducing the world to meaningless matter subject to the arbitrary will of a God whom we could now only serve by observing his strict moral commandments and resigning ourselves fatefully to his will, as to that of an absolute monarch.

Yet this is not the only religious origin of our domination by science. The Renaissance had already given birth to a new sense of the mutability of nature and the creative ability of human beings to modify nature, often indebted to magical and alchemical, besides Neoplatonic traditions. One could say that, in this regard, the poetic impulse and the exploration of nature were originally fused. Within this fusion, the idea that nature herself is poetic, is alive, coherent, purposeful and self-producing, and in some way “psychic” and “cognitive,” typically held sway.

Once upon a time, historians thought that this outlook was simply swept away by the mechanical one, but now we know that, already in the eighteenth century and in the Romantic period, the “magical” understanding of science often returned: things like gravity, electro-magnetism, force fields, and biological growth and evolution naturally encouraged doctrines of vitalism and panpsychism in one mode or another. Today, once again, those doctrines are being taken seriously.

What is more, whether we are talking about enchanted or disenchanted approaches to nature, theology impinged in another way, in terms of overarching Christian doctrines. Creation from nothing encouraged the view that nature made perfect sense; if it did not do so, this must be because of the Fall and the loss of Adam’s knowledge of creatures, which was also his perfect control of them. Thus, in Bacon and many other thinkers, our “science” began as a religious project of recovering this knowledge in a way that anticipated the eschaton, or the end of the world, including the eventual resurrection of all human beings.

Again, this eschatological aspect of science did not, after all, simply disappear after the Baroque era. It reappears in German Romanticism and most strikingly in the Russian “Silver Age” —the cultural renaissance of Russian poetry, philosophy and mysticism—at the end of the nineteenth century. At times, the link of science with religion was retained—the work of science was only one of assisting eventual human “deification”—the doctrine that humans should participate in the divine nature, which is how Russian Orthodoxy understands salvation. But increasingly, from Nikolai Federov onwards, eschatology assumed a sheerly secular guise.

Science, unlike religion, really could guarantee immortality, resurrect everyone who has ever lived, and make life possible on myriad other planets in order to contain these numbers. The fact that Fedorov lived literally the ascetic life of a monk, and that even in Soviet times Yuri Gagarin’s first flight was into the “cosmos” (not space), shows that here science as secularisation of religion is not mere metaphor. Today, Federov’s doctrines have themselves been resuscitated in Putin’s Russia.

We can see this transmutation of Christian hope into transhumanism in the United States too, in important ways the heir of the strong Puritan enthusiasm for Baconianism. But in both cases, we can surely say that secularised religion produces more fantasies than religion itself, and more dangerous fantasies which tend to encourage the untrammelled power of both state and market, and increasingly of the two in alliance.

Once more, we can see here how the “scientific” understanding of knowledge as power tends to reduce to a machinic control of some humans by others.

But the answer to this threat of scientism is not to reject science. Instead, it is, more realistically, to realise that our supposed unalterable understanding of the facts of nature keeps changing drastically—not because scientific truth is relative, but because it seems that nature herself is an inexhaustibly infinite mystery, holding secrets that we will never finally get to the bottom of. The answers that she does supply are relative to the limited questions that we ask, and, even then, not all her secrets are revealed by scientific control as opposed to poetic resonance and sympathy.

___

But in both cases, we can surely say that secularised religion produces more fantasies than religion itself, and more dangerous fantasies which tend to encourage the untrammelled power of both state and market, and increasingly of the two in alliance.

___

Indeed, we could not reject science if we wanted to, because the extraordinary human take-off since the seventeenth century is indeed the result of a Baconian systematic recording and linking of artisanal skills, combined with a linking of these to mathematical and metaphysical conjectural speculation—as A. N. Whitehead concluded. The beneficial results have been so overwhelming that we would not want to go back on this, even if that were possible.

And yet, there have also been terrible drawbacks in terms of an unleashing of an unrestricted human competition for power and the despoliation of nature through “knowing” her by “putting her to the torture” as the legally-minded Bacon advocated.  One can argue, nonetheless, that this is also to do with scientism and not science. Or with a specifically secular mode of science which first still ideally seeks for mechanism rather than admitting the palpable presence of “natural magic”—as even Bacon allowed. And which, secondly, sees technological control as the only mode of power, ignoring the other power of poetic insight which extends the range of human meaning by also revealing hidden connections and possibilities within nature, as the poet-scientist Goethe rightly claimed.

What we need, therefore, in order to escape scientism, is not a return to the more purely contemplative Middle Ages—and again, that is not possible. Instead, we need to revive the Renaissance-Romantic sense of the embedding of the technological in the poetic, which ultimately involves an embedding in religious vision and liturgical practice.

For the shocking thing is that “science,” which is not exclusive to Christian civilisation, was nonetheless in its take-off a specifically Christian project—supposed to unleash, as Bacon said, a more charitable because more practical knowledge. And one which both assisted and looked towards the telos of the divine restoration of an earth that includes human thinkers and makers, just because all its processes build up to that.

It is only this Christian-Neoplatonic theurgic esotericism and apocalypticism that can save us now from that which evermore reveals itself to be its secular parody. Theurgy, the practice of uniting human work with divine power, bridges the gap between spiritual vision and practical action. Human technological activity has the potential to transcend the manipulation of matter into a collaboration with a greater, deeper good.