Religion and scientism: a shared cognitive conundrum

Abstract

This article challenges the claim that the rise of naturalism is devastating to religious belief. This claim hinges on an extreme interpretation of naturalism called scientism, the metaphysical view that science offers an exhaustive account of the real. For those committed to scientism, religious discourse is epistemically illegitimate, because it refers to matters that transcend—and so cannot be verified by—scientific inquiry. This article reconstructs arguments from the phenomenological tradition that seem to undercut this critique, viz., arguments that scientism itself cannot be justified without recourse to matters that transcend scientific inquiry. If this is true, then scientism and religion share a cognitive conundrum: a commitment to truths that cannot in principle be known from our current perspective.