Atheism often parasitically draws on the prestige of science to take unsuspecting masses away from theism. How? By equating science with scientism. 

Science investigates the nature of material reality, specifically its measurable parameters; it is like a map of a territory. Undoubtedly, scientific models are far more sophisticated than maps, still, like maps, scientific models are powerful tools for navigating reality. Yet just as the map is not the territory, scientific models of reality are not the reality. And as science studies only material reality, it can’t tell us anything conclusive about God, who is by definition a non-material being. 

Different from science is scientism, which is the ideology that science alone can provide all knowledge. Scientism is actually unscientific because its core claims can’t be scientifically proven. The Bhagavad-gita (18.22) cautions that when we equate one fragment of reality with the totality of reality, as does scientism, our perception is in the mode of ignorance. 

Scientism and atheism are natural bedfellows. Many atheists claim that God’s non-existence is a scientific conclusion, while actually it is their own ideological founding assumption that is grafted onto science through scientism. When an ideology claims to not be an ideology and therefore claims universal validity, that’s when it becomes disingenuous. 

When competing ideologies such as theism and atheism are studied objectively without any preconceived labels, many of the world’s greatest scientists have found science and theism eminently compatible. French physicist Blaise Pascal put it well: “Little science takes you away from God, but more of it takes you to him.” As long as we equate science with scientism, we stay blind to God; when we free ourselves from the hubris of scientism, we become open to God. 

One-sentence summary: 

The ideology that pretends to not be an ideology is often disingenuous — learn to see through atheism’s self-serving misappropriation of science.  

Think it over:

  • What is the difference between science and scientism?
  • How do atheists misappropriate science?
  • How does a little of science take us away from God?

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18.22: And that knowledge by which one is attached to one kind of work as the all in all, without knowledge of the truth, and which is very meager, is said to be in the mode of darkness.

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