From Altars to Algorithms: How Science Became the New Religion

There is a familiar story we tell ourselves about the modern world. It begins with religion as darkness, dogma, and fanaticism; continues with science as light, clarity, and liberation; and ends with a future in which human beings, finally freed from superstition, will understand themselves and the world with objective precision. It is a powerful story, and for a long time it was necessary. Without it, we might never have broken the grip of religious authority that confused obedience with truth and certainty with salvation. Yet the story has hardened into something it was never meant to be. What began as a method of inquiry has quietly become a worldview, and what was meant to free observation has begun to police it.

The tension that runs through this transformation is not between science and spirituality as such, but between openness and closure. This tension has been present in the distinction between faith and belief, in the difference between authentic spirituality and fanaticism, in the role of uncertainty, and in the way scientism now functions psychologically like a religion. At stake is not whether science is right or wrong, nor whether spirituality is true or false, but whether we are still capable of sustaining observation without prematurely explaining it away. Faith, in its deeper theological sense, was never meant to be certainty. It was a form of trust that acknowledged transcendence, not possession of truth. Fanaticism emerged precisely when that trust collapsed into rigid belief, when symbols hardened into idols and doubt was cast out as moral failure. Modern science rightly rebelled against this. It demanded evidence, repeatability, and humility before what can be observed. In doing so, it performed an act of purification that was historically indispensable. Objective factuality was necessary to separate inquiry from authority and to prevent belief from tyrannizing reality.

But something subtle happened along the way. Methodological restraint slowly became metaphysical assertion. What science bracketed for the sake of inquiry—meaning, value, interior experience—was later dismissed as unreal or irrelevant. The scientific attitude of “we do not yet know” was transformed into a cultural conviction that only what can be measured truly exists. This was not demanded by science itself, but by a psychological need for certainty in a world that had lost its older religious frameworks. It is here that experienced spirituality becomes threatening. Not because it contradicts science, but because it bypasses institutional mediation. Lived spiritual experience does not present itself as universal law; it does not ask for obedience; it does not even demand belief from others. It says only that something has been seen, endured, or undergone, and that this has altered the way one exists. Such experience cannot be easily validated or invalidated by scientific methods, because it is not primarily propositional. It belongs to the domain of meaning rather than mechanism.

Scientism, unlike science, cannot tolerate this. It must either reduce spiritual experience to pathology, illusion, or neural noise, or translate it into acceptable metaphors stripped of existential depth. This is why uncertainty is praised in theory but feared in practice. In scientific papers, uncertainty is a technical parameter, a margin of error, something to be narrowed. In lived experience, uncertainty is a condition of openness, a space in which meaning can appear without guarantee. The former is manageable; the latter is destabilizing.

Quantum mechanics is often invoked as a bridge between science and spirituality, but this invocation is usually misunderstood. Quantum theory does not validate mystical claims, nor does it re-enchant the universe in any simple way. What it does do is fracture the fantasy of absolute objectivity. Observation is no longer cleanly separable from reality; the observer is implicated in what is observed. This should have been an invitation to epistemic humility. Instead, it was largely absorbed into more sophisticated forms of control, probability, and prediction. Mystery was not embraced; it was operationalized. The contemporary scientific media landscape plays a decisive role in this transformation. Scientific findings are no longer presented as provisional, contested, and context-dependent. They are packaged as settled truths, moral imperatives, and identity markers. The language of “following the science” replaces the practice of understanding it. Dissent is not debated but moralized. Uncertainty is framed as danger rather than as the very condition of inquiry. In this way, scientism quietly takes on the psychological functions of religion: authority, orthodoxy, heresy, and reassurance in the face of existential anxiety.

This is not a conspiracy, nor is it simply hypocrisy. It is a response to a real human need. When traditional religion collapsed in many parts of the modern world, it left behind not only freedom, but also disorientation. Science filled that vacuum, not only as a method, but as a promise: that reality is intelligible, that progress is inevitable, that suffering can be managed, that death itself may eventually be solved. This promise is seductive, and it has delivered extraordinary achievements. But it also narrows the horizon of what counts as meaning.

Authentic spirituality begins precisely where this narrowing becomes visible. It does not oppose science, nor does it seek to replace it. It simply refuses closure. It insists on sustained observation without the demand for final explanation. It recognizes that not all insight takes the form of knowledge, and that not all truth can be converted into control. In this sense, spirituality is not a regression into pre-scientific thinking, but a continuation of the scientific attitude at a deeper existential level. It is attention without guarantees.

This brings us, finally, to Yuval Noah Harari and his vision of the future. Harari is often read as a prophet of scientification, a herald of a world in which algorithms know us better than we know ourselves, in which meaning is replaced by data, and in which humanism gives way to techno-optimization. He is not wrong in his diagnosis of where certain trajectories are leading. He is right to say that traditional narratives of the self are being destabilized, that biology and technology are converging, and that our myths are no longer anchored in transcendence. Where Harari falters is not in his analysis, but in what he takes to be left over once meaning is dismantled. His vision assumes that when spiritual and religious frameworks dissolve, what remains is either manipulation or resignation. Meaning becomes something we invent or discard, not something that emerges through lived openness. Uncertainty, in this vision, is something to be minimized through better models, not something to be inhabited.

But what if Harari’s future is not inevitable? What if the increasing visibility of uncertainty, complexity, and observer-dependence does not lead to nihilism or control, but to a renewed capacity for attention? What if the collapse of grand narratives is not the end of spirituality, but the end of its institutional monopolization? In that case, the future Harari describes would not eliminate spirituality, but strip away its false certainties and leave behind something quieter, less defensible, and more real.

Harari is right that we can no longer rely on inherited beliefs. He is right that science has transformed our understanding of what we are. But he is wrong to assume that what cannot be scientifically guaranteed must therefore be empty. The most profound forms of spirituality have always known that they cannot be justified, only lived. They do not compete with science, because they are not explanations. There are ways of staying open when the explanation ends.

In this sense, the true alternative to both fanaticism and scientism is not a return to faith as certainty, nor a surrender to data as destiny, but a disciplined willingness to say “I don’t know” and remain present. This is not the “I don’t know” of ignorance waiting to be filled, but the “I don’t know” of reverence, patience, and attention. It is the same posture that gave birth to science before it became a worldview, and the same posture that underlies every authentic spiritual tradition. If there is a future worth hoping for, it is not one in which science finally explains everything, nor one in which spirituality retreats into obscurity, but one in which observation is freed from the demand to conclude. Such a future would not be governed by belief or disbelief, but by a shared humility before what exceeds us. In that sense, Harari may be right about the dangers we face, but wrong about the horizon that remains. The future is not faithless. It is uncertain. And that uncertainty, if we allow it, may yet become a way of seeing.