Dare to know! The existential costs of a faith in science

ABSTRACT

We explored the differing dimensions of science beliefs and how they relate to existential benefits such as meaning in life and feelings of significance. Across two studies involving American adults and American STEM workers (N = 1001), scientism and scientific reductionism were negatively associated with existential benefits. In contrast, optimism towards science was positively associated with existential benefits. Our findings suggest that a dogmatic view of science does not serve as a substitute for the meaning and significance that religion often provides. The results also highlight the importance of treating faith in science as a multi-dimensional construct.

KEYWORDS:

• Scientism
• science
• religion
• meaning in life
• existential psychology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2024.2314294

Open Practices Statement

The surveys, data, and R code used in Studies 1 and 2 are available on the OSF at: https://tinyurl.com/4hh2a7dr.

Data availability statement

The surveys, data, and R code used in Studies 1 and 2 are available on the OSF at: https://tinyurl.com/4hh2a7dr

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://tinyurl.com/4hh2a7dr

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Our survey included an exploratory meaning of life measure, which asked identical questions to the meaning in life measure except the questions referred to life in general (e.g. instead of the item ‘My life as a whole has meaning’, we used ‘Life as a whole has meaning’. Given the high correlation between the meaning in/of life measures (r = .67) and the similarity in results, we do not discuss the meaning of life measure in the main text. However, in the SOM we provide the correlations between this scale and the other constructs.

2. The authors thank Dr Will Mason-Wilkes for raising this point.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [435-2019-0480].