Looking surprised, as though I had read her mind, she acknowledged that my understanding was exactly what she had in mind. My nurse was expressing the view called scientism. Since scientism is so pervasive today—it is the intellectual and cultural air that we breathe—she could not have even named the worldview she was presupposing and articulating. Roughly, scientism is the view that the hard sciences—like chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy—provide the only genuine knowledge