In his book 'Why Religion Matters,' Huston Smith identifies scientism — defined as the dogmatic belief that science is the only path to a complete understanding of reality — as the primary cause of the modern spiritual crisis.

Caveats

• Smith's book uses a 'four walls of the tunnel' framework (science, higher education, media, and law) as structural co-drivers of spiritual decline — calling scientism the singular 'primary cause' overstates the book's own architecture.
• The characterization of scientism as 'the primary problem' derives partly from a secondary commentator's summary (Washington University Open Scholarship), not an unambiguous direct quote from Smith ranking it above the other three tunnel walls.
• Smith's own definition of scientism is two-part — encompassing both the primacy of the scientific method AND the fundamentality of material entities — which is broader than the claim's definition of scientism as solely 'the dogmatic belief that science is the only path to a complete understanding of reality.'