True or false: More people have been killed in the name of religion than any other cause.”
“I believe in science; I don’t believe in God.”
I’ve heard it more times than I can count. Perhaps you have, too.
And, like me, perhaps you’ve tried to explain why science and religion need not conflict, but your argument fell on deaf ears.
Why? Because they really do believe in science—not the scientific method, but science itself. They believe science can solve every problem and explain every mystery. Simply put, they believe science, not God, is omniscient.
This belief in the ultimate power of science is called “scientism.” There’s a dark side to scientism, for it removes God from the picture. And if you remove God, you have no ultimate basis for morality. And with no basis for morality, some of the worst atrocities of the past 150 years have used science to justify their evil.
Adolph Hitler and the Nazis practiced eugenics — the man-made effort to speed the work of natural selection by eliminating the “weaker” elements of the species; hence, the Holocaust.
Stalin, Mao, and other Communist dictators were driven by an atheistic, materialistic, evolutionary worldview that justified the extinction of millions in search of their utopia of equality.
In America, our abortion holocaust is justified by scientists who assure us the “fetus” is not a living human being. They seek to shame us if we pass moral judgments on their “healthcare.” Nor are we to judge a doctor who mutilates the body of a child in the name of “gender-affirming healthcare.”
Let’s be clear: science is not to blame for these atrocities for science stays in its lane of analyzing the physical world. But scientism is a philosophy, a worldview, a belief system, and as such, far more people have been killed as a result of this radical belief system than ever died in the name of religion.
