The authority of science in contemporary culture is enormous, and largely deserved. The scientific method — formulating testable hypotheses, gathering empirical evidence, revising theories in response to data — has produced the most reliable body of knowledge about the physical world that human beings have ever assembled. From germ theory to genetics, from quantum mechanics to cosmology, science has transformed our understanding of nature and our capacity to live within it.
But science’s authority has a scope. It applies to empirically testable claims about the physical world. It does not apply to all claims — including some of the most important ones.
What scientism is
Scientism is the view that science is the only reliable method of acquiring knowledge — that any question science cannot answer in principle is not a genuine question, or has no genuine answer. It is distinct from science itself, which is a method. Scientism is a philosophical claim about the nature and limits of knowledge.
The problem with scientism is that it refutes itself. The claim “only empirically testable claims are meaningful” is not itself empirically testable. It is a philosophical claim about what counts as knowledge — and as such, it cannot be established by the very method it privileges. Scientism is a philosophical position that undermines itself by its own criteria.
Questions science does not answer
Consider the following questions. Why does the universe exist rather than nothing? Is it wrong to torture children for entertainment? Is the past real in a way the future is not? What makes an action genuinely free rather than merely caused? Is the external world really there, or is it a representation in a mind? What is it for a proof to be valid? Why does the universe follow mathematical laws?
These are not questions science can answer — not because we lack data, but because they are not the kind of questions empirical investigation addresses. They are philosophical, mathematical, or metaphysical questions. Serious intellectual inquiry requires engaging them, not dismissing them as meaningless because they fall outside the scientific method’s scope.
The existence of God is one of these questions. It is not an empirical hypothesis of the kind science tests. It is a metaphysical question about the ultimate ground of reality. Science can provide evidence relevant to it — the Big Bang, fine-tuning, the emergence of consciousness — but it cannot resolve it by the methods of laboratory investigation. The claim “science has disproved God” misunderstands both the nature of the claim being evaluated and the scope of the method being applied.
The relationship between science and metaphysics
Science operates within a framework of assumptions that science itself cannot justify — that the external world is real, that our sensory faculties are reliable, that mathematical structures describe physical reality, that induction is valid. These are metaphysical commitments that are prior to scientific investigation, not derived from it.
The existence of these prior commitments does not undermine science. It locates it accurately. Science is a powerful method operating within a framework it inherits from philosophy and cannot itself validate. That framework is the proper domain of metaphysical inquiry — including inquiry into the ultimate nature of reality, the ground of the rational order, and the existence of God.