Science as Salvation

Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning (1992) is Midgley's most sustained analysis of how scientific rhetoric has absorbed the structure of religious promise — complete with eschatology, soteriology, and the narrative of redemption through specialized knowledge. The book traces how, as traditional religion receded from educated Western culture, the salvific impulse did not disappear but migrated into scientific discourse, producing a class of claims that use the vocabulary of science to make promises only religion had previously made: transcendence of embodiment, immortality, the fulfillment of all human longing, the elimination of suffering. Midgley was not hostile to either science or religion. She was hostile to the fraudulent hybrid — the impostor that uses scientific authority to make religious promises, and religious fervor to defend scientific claims.