I want to make another attempt to write about scientism. This may be futile; even after posting what I thought was a clear definition of scientism, and clarifying that scientism is not science, some commenters appeared to read the scientism post as being anti-science.
So let me say, again, that I have huge respect for science, and one of the things I have always appreciated about Buddhism is that it doesn't demand I believe something that contradicts scientific knowledge. Further, I say scientism (and its sibling, materialism) is itself unscientific. It demands a belief that cannot be verified or observed through the scientific method; it must be taken on faith.
Brad Warner touches on scientism/materialism in his book There Is No God and He Is Always With You. The third chapter is mostly about how all intellectual arguments about God, whether for or against, end up being silly. Then he writes (pages 23-24):
"Dawkins's book, like so many others both for and against the idea of God, stays purely in the realm of the intellect. Granted, Dawkins does at least back up his intellectual arguments with scientific observations. But even scientific observations belong to the realm of the intellect. They are the intellect's response to stimulation of the senses.
"What w are dealing with in Zen is something entirely different. To a person who has never known anything other than the stimulation of the senses and the intellect's response to them, the very idea that there could be anything beyond that seems absurd. . . . But our real experience includes things that the senses cannot perceive and that the intellect cannot comprehend."
You could define much of Buddhism as a method for directly and intimately experiencing that which the senses cannot perceive and that the intellect cannot comprehend. But scientism says that there is nothing that the senses (perhaps with technological aid) cannot perceive and that the intellect cannot comprehend.
And that's the orthodoxy that believers in scientism accept on faith. The hypothesis that there is nothing "real" that can't be measured or known through the scientific method cannot be tested by means of the scientific method, as scientists currently define it. Therefore, scientism is not science but dogma.
To reject scientism doesn't mean one must believe in fairies and unicorns. As I wrote in the last post, there is no reason to assume the stuff the scientific method cannot test or detect or measure is any more supernatural than gravity or cats. It's just stuff the scientific method cannot test or detect or measure.
However, keeping Buddhism in a scientistic box pretty much smothers it to death. Yeah, you can still benefit from meditation, and the residue of dharma leaves you with a pleasant, feel-good philosophy. But clinging to scientism eliminates the potential of wisdom through direct insight, which is what the historical Buddha was all about. It destroys the possibility of enlightenment and of liberation from dukkha.
That said, I do not deny the possibility that, someday, there could be a new scientific method that will detect and measure more than the current one measures. Rejecting scientism does not make one closed to the potential of future scientific inquiry or discovery. Not at all.
But there's no need to put Buddhism on a shelf until it can be validated by science. It's done quite well all these centuries without scientific validation, and it doesn't need scientific validation now, any more than science needs Buddhist validation.
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