Without criticizing the sciences as a group of disciplines, this insightful work explores the ideology that insists that the various scientific projects are parts of a sole, monolithic, singular generator of truth. While the sciences, because each has a different focus, function in vastly different ways, this ideology insists it provides a unity to the scientific project. This ideology insists that scientific findings allow no place for personal metaphysical faith. But both its promulgators and unknowing bystanders assume this ideology is scientific itself. This book shows why this view and the related ideology is not, in any way, a scientific finding.

Under such an ideology, only scientific results, whether experimental or observational, can aspire to truth. Religion, if considered at all, can be scrutinized only objectively and literally. The ideology treats alleged religious experience as a distracting red herring that can, at best, only shunt objective investigation down a bottomless road. Personal encounters with the divine are only petty self-indulgence seeking only to get happy.

Joseph Hinman, author of The Trace of God: A Rational Warrant for Belief, addresses these issues and further topics, such as the historical development of science, the nature of religious experience, reductionism as a tool of ideology, and the sort of evidence that rationally warrants belief in God. We are faced with an ideological claim that insists we choose between science and belief. However, readers will find that the sciences need not rely upon its practitioner’s atheism, agnosticicsm, or theism for its project to continue effectively.