Science, Scientism, and Insanity: Origins of the Universe

Questions about the origins of the universe have, of course, fascinated many people, especially in terms of speculation, for many centuries and will, predictably, continue to do so for many more centuries.  The answers have been many and varied over the course of time.  Views have ranged from an eternal reality that included the universe as having always existed; other views speculated as to its being actually created; usually, the latter opinion would be or is held by religions purporting to give different variations of speculation or certainty upon the theme of an actually created universe. 

But, the views as to what might be possible to be thought have been made subject, in turn, to many different interpretations of thought.  Religion, primitive and advanced, and, later as societies have progressed beyond mere mythologies or beliefs, science began to give answers. 

Many still claim that, for instance, religion and science, in terms of what can be properly known about origins, must always or usually conflict or, at least, be in basic opposition upon primary points held, ultimately, in dispute; but, this modernist or, perhaps, postmodernist opinion is not being accepted, in this present article, attempting here to give some brief coverage to the important subject of origins.

Nominalism, also known as Occamism, freely allows people to absurdly believe two (often completely) opposing things to be held as true at one and the same time and in the same case.  Equally, it allows for people to believe, e.g., that something in religion may be true but false regarding science and vice versa; this is known as the two truths theory, which is, for instance, denied totally by Roman Catholicism. 

The Catholic Faith insists that what is true in science must, logically speaking, be also true in religion because all truth is ultimately unitary in that there is only one God; reason and faith when both are correctly understood always, therefore, support each other, they do not actually conflict; thus, no truth can ever really contradict another truth, in science or religion, by inherent definition of that which is, in fact, true; on the other hand, because of the subjectivism of nominalist thinking. 

For Catholicism, there is no actual conflict that can ever exist between faith and reason, religion and science, though incorrect thinking can, however, tend to posit unreal or untrue contradictions due to faulty, inaccurate reasoning, flawed cognition.  All of the sciences are honored, by this religion, in terms of their properly seeking to expand the range and depth, scope and amount, of accumulating human knowledge.  Nonetheless, it helps to critically distinguish science, the systematic and methodical pursuit of exact knowledge, from the inappropriate aping of it that has often been properly denominated as scientism, a false view or use of an abusive and corrupted understanding of (genuine) science.