Physics concerns what we can say about nature" (145). This would not only deflate any supposed exclusivistic epistemic superiority, but enable science to be science and not a barely disguised, a priori metaphysical ideology such as when Steven Weinberg says in the First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of a Universe that human life is a "farcical outcome of a chain of accidents" . in "an over- whelmingly hostile universe . and faces a future extinction. the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless" (1977:155). .
This sort of proclamation is really not science, but a particular extrapolation of then current scientific thought, .
but certainly not the only interpretation possible or plausible. This results often in an arbitrary and artificial reductionism that trivializes reality more than explains it and seems more a psychological projection than empirical discovery. R. Catell had said that psychology was "the last nail in God's coffin" (Arts:66), but a diminished intelligence may more certainly be a nail in the coffin of scientism and its refusal to consider the full range of human faculties and experience. As Berger says, "Hopelessness does not have a superior epistemological status" (142). .
Do the "truths" of science necessarily mean the abolition of religious "truths"? When Flew's falsifiability challenge to theism, made in 1955, is directed towards science itself, we find that scientism so rigs the methodology and criteria for truth that the meaning of falsifiability itself is reduced. The sterilization of symbolism in science results in a meager envisioning of reality that materializes whatever contemporary physics says is nonmaterial. Tillich said that if,a religious symbol does not suggest its own incompleteness .
and inadequacy in presenting its referent, then it becomes idolatry (Barbour:1974:16). The same can apply to symbolism in science.
