The Science of Religion and the Religion of Scientism: A Neuroscientist's Perspective on Consciousness, Morality,andtheNewAtheism

Scientism claims that religion has nothing to offer our understanding of reality. But since religion can be subjected to scientific methods of study, it paradoxically becomes part of a reality larger than that investigated by the sciences.

Scientism is the belief that the empirical sciences provide the sole methods of knowing the truths about reality, and that anything not scientifically observable cannot be real. Hence, religion, theology, ethics, morality, and the creative arts cannot add to our understanding of reality. Scientism, moreover, maintains that scientific and religious understandings of reality relate to each other in distinctively oppositional ways.

Amply informed by philosophical and historical scholarship and by knowledge of evolutionary and neurocognitive methods of research, Bruno G. Breitmeyer offers an in-depth look at the relation between scientism and the sciences of religion.

In Part 1 Breitmeyer covers the sciences of religion and of related fields of morality and art. In all fields, scientistic influences are clearly discernable. In Part 2 he looks at “nice” and “pernicious” versions of scientism and, despite the latter version, at how it constitutes an atheistic ersatz-religion, especially among scientifically informed neoatheists. In Part 3 he goes beyond scientism in two ways. He first introduces the concept of technoscientism―the belief that modern technology can address and solve any problem facing humanity―and traces its history back to Promethean and Gnostic philosophies. Second, he proposes a novel theology of science in which God is conceived as Creative Mind.

The concept of conscious mind, evident throughout the book, points to the crucial role that human subjective experiences plays in scientific and religious practices. Breitmeyer argues that however resolutely scientism attempts to sever science from religion, a supremely creative and conscious Intelligence unites them. Without such Intelligence―theists call it God―neither science nor religion could exist.

Bruno G. Breitmeyer is Director of Visual Cognition Lab, University of Houston. Christopher T. Baglow is the director of the Science and Religion Initiative in the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame.