Suppose someone uses a map to travel to a friend’s house. At each step during the journey, suppose the map guides them well, and their faith in it increases more and more. Finally when they reach their friend’s house and see him, they check their map, don’t find him there and declare, “You don’t exist.” Their friend would be right to retort, “Your intelligence doesn’t exist – the map is not meant to show people. It doesn’t show all of reality.”
Science acts like a map for navigating material reality. The scientific picture of nature enables us to reliably do things such as getting where we want to go. Being enamored by these navigational abilities, some people deem science the only reliable source of knowledge about everything. Thus, they become believers of scientism.
What’s wrong with scientism? It misrepresents science. Mainstream science doesn’t show all of reality. Operating on the premise of methodological naturalism, it looks for material explanations for material phenomena while saying nothing about any nonmaterial factors. In principle, the map of naturalist science isn’t meant to depict nonmaterial realities such as consciousness.
When believers of scientism encounter consciousness, especially its irreducible subjective dimension, they deny its existence by deeming its locus – our sense of self – a neurochemical illusion. But it is only because they have consciousness that they can say anything about it, either its existence or non-existence. Put another way, only because consciousness is real can they make the absurd claim that it is not real.
The Bhagavad-gita (16.09) indicates that people destroy their soul because of buying into a fanatically materialistic worldview (16.08). If instead we study the Gita’s wisdom, we can intellectually grasp the reality of the soul and gradually by the practice of yoga realize it to be our essence.
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