Scientific Polytheism

by Daniel Bullard

October 1st, 2025

From a young age, I’ve been fascinated by the sciences. When several other boys in my first grade class wanted to be archaeologists after seeing Indiana Jones, I was confident I wanted to be a paleontologist. I could name so many dinosaurs. I went through several phases of scientific interest: how planes work, the solar system, and countless more things I’ve forgotten about. If I heard about something, I wanted to know how it worked, and this happened at such a frequency that it’s honestly mind-boggling that I didn’t get diagnosed with ADHD until I was 30. 

This curiosity and love of learning new things has persisted every day of my life, and I thank my parents for that. They got me books and they read them with me. They encouraged me to learn new things. The most important thing, though, was that they listened when I wanted to talk about what I’d learned. I’m sure there were times when my constant need to say out loud the information I’d gained was annoying beyond belief, but I never remember being quieted or discouraged by them. It’s never felt unsafe to tell them what I’ve been thinking about, even when that mask is on to the rest of the world. 

It is this instinct to constantly question things that makes me a scientist. Now, the question becomes “How can I be a scientist and a polytheist at the same time? Isn’t it contradictory to hold both viewpoints at once?” The answer is found in examining the beliefs and functions of each. 

Some scientists resist the idea that there are beliefs in science, arguing that science deals only in facts. I know I’ve been heard to say, when asked if I believe in evolution, that “I don’t believe in evolution. I know evolution.” In some senses, that viewpoint is correct; I know the facts of evolution and the processes that have verified the experimental data and observations that make up the Theory of Evolution. However, all sciences have, at their core, philosophical beliefs that cannot be examined by science alone. 

The first and most important philosophical idea at the very foundation of the scientific method is Empiricism. Empiricism is a philosophical school that deals with epistemology, the branch of philosophy that examines the nature and limits of knowledge. Empiricism holds that true knowledge comes from sensory experiences and experimental procedures. Because sensory experiences are subjective, science tends to favor experimental evidence in its relative objectivity.  This places Empiricism in tension with the other two main schools of epistemology: Rationalism and Skepticism. 

Rationalism is the belief that reason, the capacity to deduce conclusions from information using logic, is the primary source and test of knowledge. Prominent Rationalist René Descartes, in his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences, stated that “except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.” Descartes placed greater emphasis on logic than experience because he believed that our perceptions are often flawed and insufficient to attain full knowledge of a subject.

Philosophical Skepticism stands apart from Empiricism and Rationalism because it challenges the view that knowledge can be held at all. There are two main types of Skepticism, epistemological and methodological; the former is the claim that knowledge cannot be held, and the latter is a method whereby all truths are evaluated first from a position of doubting them. Methodological Skepticism is also called Cartesian doubt, a method developed by Descartes. 

Ultimately, Empiricism, Rationalism, and Skepticism don’t exist on separate islands of thought, but rather overlap each other in several key ways. Science exists in the overlapping space between empirical and skeptical thought. Scientists start from a position of doubting their hypothesis and so apply sense data and experimental evidence in attempt after attempt to prove themselves wrong. This scientific method has yielded the best model of our physical universe so far, and continues to add to it and adjust for new information. 

The other belief that underpins the sciences is a metaphysical one: Materialism. Materialism is the belief that the universe is made up of only the substance of matter and energy. It has nothing to do with shopping, with the exception that everything you buy is made of matter. Materialism is a monist (of one substance) philosophy and stands distinct from pluralist or dualist metaphysical models that claim the universe has multiple substances; matter, spirit, soul consciousness, mind, to name a few. This makes perfect sense for the sciences: matter and energy are the only substances we have so far been able to measure. However, our spiritual experiences indicate that not everything is as it seems. Does the fact that we cannot measure our inner experiences or those of others mean that what we believe as polytheists is not empirical?

No. Empiricism wields only experience as its sword. The act of measuring hones this weapon, but it is not the sword itself. When we experience anything; pain, fear, the color red; the way we communicate that to others is through language. When I say I’m in pain, you know that I’m having the experience of being damaged. When I say I feel fear, you know the experience of adrenaline flooding your body. When I say I see red, you can connect that to the things you were taught are red: firetrucks, roses, stop signs. In all things, we cannot share our experience with others, so we are required to use the imperfect, secondhand tool of language to describe it. Thus, no objective analysis of language can ever fully capture subjective experience.   

All science is built on the reporting of these subjective experiences, but if we act as if only science can discover truth, we are engaging in Scientism: the belief that the scientific method is the best or only way to determine truth. Because scientism is a philosophical belief, and not a scientific claim, it is self-defeating. It claims that scientific experimentation is the path to truth, but cannot prove the truth of itself by scientific experimentation. 

Because our experiences are subjective and completely internal, the one thing you can’t do is know what my experience is like. An example of this comes in a thought experiment proposed by philosopher John Locke, who imagined two people who experience color differently; where one person sees orange, the other sees green.

In the image above, since both men had been taught that pumpkins are orange, they would both report that the pumpkins are orange if asked despite the difference in their experiences. We can’t know if our experiences have the same quality, only that we describe them with the same language. The power of science is that it clearly defines that language and repeatedly tests it. The scientific method is still subjective, because it relies on the experiences of the scientists and experimental subjects, but its strength is that it is comparing experiences. 

So, how do we, as polytheists, be empirical? First, we accept that the religious experiences we have are personal, subjective, and non-measurable. However, those experiences are a form of empirical data. What we should be doing is questioning those experiences. Following my earlier post about Personal Gnosis, I had a very good conversation with some fellow Heathens about their subjective beliefs and the experiences that informed them. A friend of mine recalled a time that she felt like she had been “slapped on the back of the head” by a particular deity. I asked, “What did that experience feel like? What about it made you feel it was this god?” Those aren’t easy questions to answer, and they kicked off an hour of conversation about the qualities of our experiences. Some of us see things, some hear words, some feel emotions or external sensations. By breaking down the experiences into discrete sensations, thoughts, and emotions they are able to be compared. In this way, we can be empirical about belief.  

The validity of merging empiricism, skepticism, and religious belief becomes more obvious when we take into account all the other aspects of our lives that we accept without experimental evidence. We fall in love without any way to quantify those feelings. We trust in our family and friends in times when we have no evidence to back it up. If we were to dismiss our private experiences as epistemologically worthless, life as we know it would grind to a screeching halt. Our framework for finding truth should be empirical, but if we require it to be completely scientific, we are throwing away the vast majority of our experiential knowledge. 

So am I still a Scientist? Absolutely. My commitment will always be to the method of inquiry over the conclusion. Physics provides the best model to understand the physical world, and I am constantly in awe of it, but my search for truth does not end where physical measurement fails. It extends also into the realm of philosophy and the fullness of experience, where the data of my spiritual life are as real and demanding of answers. My polytheism is an extension of my empirical drive to build a true understanding of the universe from all the evidence of experience. It is my life lived in full.  

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