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Let’s Talk About Disagreeing With Each Other

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Let’s talk about having disagreements for a second. Disagreements about topics that make you so angry you feel like your passion could start a fire, or give you a heart attack. The ones that break your heart, that keep you up at night. Issues that have personally touched people you know, maybe the ones closest to you. The ones you lose friendships over, have broken ties, and burned bridges over.

Estimated reading time: 5.5 minutes.

Nicole Hocott at the March for Life in the nation’s capital.

Everything I say in this blog post is going to be based on this assumption: If you’re reading this, then you truly care about these issues and want other people to care as well. You want the best for those you disagree with in the following way: You want them to see your side because you believe it’s the truth. If you don’t care about convincing others of the truth, well, you should. But I won’t touch on that right now.

We all have certain topics that make our blood boil. In this post, I want to consider what our response should be to these. Let’s take a minute and step outside of any specific disagreement to look at disagreements in general. Let’s look at a few different options.

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Scientism is Not Only Self-Refuting, but Dangerous

Part Three

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Scientism is not merely wrong, but dangerous. This is the claim I want to make to conclude our series on scientism. It probably seems like an aggressive claim; perhaps it is. But it’s also right there in the subtitle of JP Moreland’s book: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology.

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes.

Power outlet on fire.

I started this series by explaining why scientism is self-refuting. Whether someone believes in strong scientism or weak scientism, their belief is logically incoherent. If scientism is true, then the non-scientific foundations on which scientism (and science!) rests would be null and void. If scientism were true, it would prove that scientism couldn’t be true; it’s a logical contradiction and has no merit as a system of thought.

I then covered the ways in which scientism influences how everyone talks about abortion. Both pro-life and pro-choice people often act like science is the thing with all the answers, but, in reality, science can only get us so far. Some scientific facts, like those from embryology, give us relevant information, but we have to use that information in non-scientific ways to come to a reasoned conclusion about abortion.

If you’ve gotten this far, you may wonder how scientism still exists and why it continues not only to survive but thrive in the public sphere. My answer is simple: scientism is a means of power for some things against other things. It is a convenient weapon in favor of moral relativism against absolute moral truths and those who claim them. Every meaningful defense of human rights must rest on moral truth, so denying moral truth must lead to an eradication of grounds for human rights. Scientism is not bad just because it is incorrect or unhelpful, but because it is a danger to humanity.