(You never know – when all the rational arguments fail, that one might actually work on some people.)

I also detect a conflation of “science” with “scientist”. Of course “science” (if we must anthropomorphise a process) cannot contemplate non-scientific things. Scientists, however, can contemplate all sorts of things after getting home from the lab, from the unknowable to the downright unbelievable.

There might well be real things in the world that can never be investigated through scientific means (actually, I’m sure there are). However, responsible scientists aren’t discouraged by the fact that science isn’t all-powerful, and go on trying to find out as much as we can, which turns out to be a very large amount indeed.

It would be too strong to declare outright that scientism doesn’t exist. What scientism is, and how much of it is out there, is a discussion worth having. But the more pervasive and threatening someone perceives scientism to be, the more likely it is that they’re jumping at shadows and mistaking for an extreme ideology what is really just the responsible attitude that important decisions should be based on things we can be confident about (which means verifiable things, which means science).