Posted on 01/23/2014 9:19:28 AM PST by Heartlander
One can at least point a direction by now. I began this series by asking, what has materialism (naturalism) done for science? It made a virtue of preferring theory to evidence, if the theory supports naturalism and the evidence doesn't. Well-supported evidence that undermines naturalism (the Big Bang and fine tuning of the universe, for example) attracted increasingly speculative attempts at disconfirmation. Discouraging results from the search for life on Mars cause us to put our faith in life on exoplanets -- lest Earth be seen as unusual (the Copernican Principle).
All this might be just the beginning of a great adventure. World-changing discoveries, after all, have originated in the oddest circumstances. Who would have expected the Americas to be discovered by people who mainly wanted peppercorns, cinnamon, sugar, and such? But disturbingly, unlike the early modern adventurers who encountered advanced civilizations, we merely imagine them. We tell ourselves they must exist; in the absence of evidence, we make faith in them a virtue. So while Bigfoot was never science, the space alien must always be so, even if he is forever a discipline without a subject.
Then, having acquired the habit, we began to conjure like sorcerer's apprentices, and with a like result: We conjured countless universes where everything and its opposite turned out to be true except, of course, philosophy and religion. Bizarre is the new normal and science no longer necessarily means reality-based thinking.
But the evidence is still there, all along the road to reality. It is still saying what the new cosmologies do not want to hear. And the cost of ignoring it is the decline of real-world programs like NASA in favor of endlessly creative speculation. It turns out that, far from being the anchor of science, materialism has become its millstone.
But now, what if the ID theorists are right, that information rather than matter is the basic stuff of the universe? It is then reasonable to think that meaning underlies the universe. Meaning cannot then be explained away. It is the irreducible core. That is why reductive efforts to explain away evidence that supports meaning (Big Bang, fine-tuning, physical laws) have led to contradictory, unresearchable, and unintelligible outcomes.
The irreducible core of meaning is controversial principally because it provides support for theism. But the alternative has provided support for unintelligibility. Finally, one must choose. If we choose what intelligent design theorist Bill Dembski calls "information realism," the way we think about cosmology changes.
First, we live with what the evidence suggests. Not simply because it suits our beliefs but because research in a meaningful universe should gradually reveal a comprehensible reality, as scientists have traditionally assumed. If information, not matter, is the substrate of the universe, key stumbling blocks of current materialist science such as origin of life, of human beings, and of human consciousness can be approached in a different way. An information approach does not attempt to reduce these phenomena to a level of complexity below which they don't actually exist.
Materialist origin of life research, for example, has been an unmitigated failure principally because it seeks a high and replicable level of order that just somehow randomly happened at one point. The search for the origin of the human race has been similarly vitiated by the search for a not-quite-human subject, the small, shuffling fellow behind the man carrying the spear. In this case, it would have been well if researchers had simply never found their subject. Unfortunately, they have attempted at times to cast various human groups in the shuffler's role. Then gotten mired in controversy, and largely got the story wrong and missed its point.
One would have thought that materialists would know better than to even try addressing human consciousness. But materialism is a totalistic creed or else it is nothing. Current theories range from physicist Max Tegmark's claim that human consciousness is a material substance through to philosopher Daniel Dennett's notion that it is best treated somewhat like "figments of imagination" (don't ask whose) through philosopher Alex Rosenberg's idea that consciousness is a problem that will have to be dissolved by neuroscience. All these theories share two characteristics: They reduce consciousness to something that it isn't. And they get nowhere with understanding what it is. The only achievement that materialist thought can claim in the area of consciousness studies is to make them sound as fundamentally unserious as many current cosmologies. And that is no mean feat.
Suppose we look at the origin of life from an information perspective. Life forms show a much higher level of information, however that state of affairs came about, than non-living matter does. From our perspective, we break no rule if we assume, for the sake of investigation, that the reason we cannot find evidence for an accidental origin of life is that life did not originate in that way. For us, nothing depends one way or the other on demonstrating that life was an accident. We do not earn the right to study life's origin by declaring that "science" means assuming that such a proposition is true and proceeding from there irrespective of consequences. So, with this in mind, what are we to make of the current state of origin-of-life research?
Editor's note: Here is the "Science Fictions" series to date at your fingertips .
Not buying this idea of brainwashing people into salvation.
Me either... rejecting evolution is NOT becoming religious..
AND... buying into some religion is NOT rejecting evolution..
They are separate BUT related concepts..
I suspect “most” don’t really care for either of them..
They are just dalliances in a mental ping pong.. i.e. masturbation..
Most religions do not require salvation... a foreign concept.. (even Judaism)
Only christianity requires a metamorphosis.. an “evolution” of sorts..
And intones a “brainwash”... some call it transformation or some other word..
In my experience some brains NEED to be washed.. “being very dirty”..
Some even “here” might need a “shower”... from time to time..
A mental Hose down... you might say... d;-)~.’.’.’.’.
Some even “here” might need a “shower”... from time to time..
A mental Hose down... you might say... d;-)~.’.’.’.’.
That has the ring of hubris to it.
That has the ring of hubris to it.
What a dirty thought.. i.e. Mental hubris rings can be washed off....
need help?..
You inside my head? I’d rather give a wolverine a bikini wax, thankyouverymuch.
LoL...
tl: Agreed. I've seen it argued that methodological materialism should be discarded, and not replaced with anything, which would leave it with no formally declared methodology at all.
Dear tacticalogic, are you arguing that methodological materialism IS the scientific method?
I had thought methodological materialism is merely a PRESUPPOSITION that gets loaded into the front-end of an application of the scientific method. IOW, you could discard that presupposition without affecting the utility of the scientific method.
The PRESUPPOSITION is that everything in the universe consists from "matter-in-its-motions" alone, these motions being somehow "lawful." (Of course, methodological materialism is silent about how the laws themselves came into existence.)
In sum, methodological materialism requires that we begin with a conclusion. To that extent, it is a rigged game.
JMHO FWIW
It's a methodology of observation and emopirical measurement. That means it's only going to work on what can be observed and measured, doesn't it?
In sum, methodological materialism requires that we begin with a conclusion. To that extent, it is a rigged game.
The Dogma of Closed Query... -OR- The Query of Dogmatic Idea Licking..
It appears to be a Religion.. a Club.. maybe a Fraternity...
Faux Open-ness... Sneaky Inquiry.. and Fascist Academics...
to put it nicely...
Oh, the Hugh Manatee!
Spirited: So-called 'scientific' and/or methodological materialism is a type of monism positing a one-dimensional view of reality grounded in the idea that matter is the universal substance. As a philosophical system it undertakes to explain everything existing and every event in the universe as resulting from the conditions and activity of matter: i.e., is matter dialectical? self-acting and improving? can it change one part of itself into an active principle?
As materialism automatically denies the existence of the two-dimensional Biblical view it negates the personal God, the supernatural dimension, soul/spirit, angels, demons, and hell.
The teleological question, so awkward for 'scientific materialism' was thought to be settled by Darwinism, when as K. Vogt cynically expressed it, the supernatural God was shown the door.
Up until the end of the 19th century the dominance of materialism allowed socialists, communists, progressives, and like-minded despots to stir up the deluded and discontented masses. However, the spiritual will not be reduced to the material, thus by the end of the 19th century a rebound toward the opposite extreme--idealism-- began.
Like it's materialist counterpart, idealism (pantheism/panentheism) is a one-dimensional view of reality. Reality is not physical matter but rather the Cosmic Mind, or perhaps Brahma, World Soul, or Void. Since all that exists is Universal Mind, then the material or physical dimension is illusion. Nor does the supernatural dimension and the personal God Who created men in His spiritual image exist.
This way of thinking is captured by Orwell in his book, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” in which negation of the physical world is an integral part of the social and political philosophy of Big Brother and his despotic Party. At one stage in the book, Winston stumbles upon the shocking realization that,
“…in the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later; the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.” (Orwell, “The New Spirituality and its Hallmarks, Alan Morrison, SCP Journal, Vol. 30:4-31:1, 2007, p. 19)
When the Thought Police agent O’Brien tortures Winston for “wrong thought” he states,
“We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation---anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to….You must get rid of these nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.”
Big Brother is a pagan Hermetic magician in a long line of magicians going back to Ham in the post-flood world followed by Nimrod and the Egyptian magus Hermes Trismegistus, the early Christian-era Simon Magus and the Gnostic Valentinus, Eastern Tantric sages, Yogis, and god-men on through to Renaissance magicians such as Agrippa, and Paracelsus.
As Big Brother is a pagan magician he holds to the oneness of existence. What this means to Big Brother is that since the universe is a self-creating, self-developing (evolving) living organism (i.e., Mind, Void, World Soul) consisting of interconnected parts (i.e., plants, animals, humans, land, cities, oceans) bound together by psychic energy then physical matter (human body, brain) and psychic energies are mutually transmutable.
This was announced as the Grand Principle of Hermes Trismegistus and found expression in the teaching that everything that is high,
".....is equal to what is low, and everything low is equal to what is high.” (God and the Knowledge of Reality, Thomas Molnar, p. 82)
Hermes formula means there is an absolute although hidden unity, a Great Chain of Being, between the lower world of physical matter and the higher astral realm of the impersonal world soul, the key of which lends to the magician incalculable powers when he earns how to acquire divine intellect.
The Great Chain of Being corresponds to an interconnected hierarchy of different unseen dimensions or astral-planes within the impersonal mind of the World Soul comprising the habitations,
“.....(of all) supernatural entities, the locale of gods and demons, the void where the thought-forms dwell, the region inhabited by spirits of the air and other elements, and the various heavens and hells with their angelic and demonic hosts…” (Beyond the Body: The Human Double and the Astral Planes, Benjamin Walker, 1974, pp. 117-118)
With the help of spirits and occult rituals, magicians, gurus, tantric sages, etc.,
“…believe that they can ‘rise on the planes’ and experience these regions in full awareness.” (ibid)
During the Renaissance, Agrippa taught Hermes’s doctrine of cosmic unity and that with the help of the Magic Way the magician could spiritually ascend the Cosmic Tree to the world soul and make use of things such as deities, angels and other powers above.
This was the core of Paracelsus’s teaching. Paracelsus held that since all that exists is matter 'down here' and psychic energy 'up there', then we are all “products of nature” and “children of the same vital and magic forces” meaning that there is a precise relationship between various organs of the human body and the “organs of the world” or astral bodies. Thus if the human soul is influenced by the astral bodies it in turn exerts a definite influence on the “world-soul.”(ibid, pp. 82-83)
Western science was made possible by the very rational Christian worldview. But from the Renaissance through to our own time it has been incrementally infiltrated and finally captured by pagan irrationalism, first by idealism, then by materialism, and now by idealism again. And not only science but the entirety of the West's traditional Christian-based worldview, which is why every aspect of our obviously insane society is rocketing out of control.
WRT the above "IT," are you speaking of methodological materialism or of the scientific method?
Not everything that exists can be directly "observed and measured." For instance, the physical laws themselves. And yet without the physical laws, science would have nothing to do.
I had thought the scientific method was about empirical phenomena; i.e., not simply "material" phenomena. Empirical phenomena are not necessarily completely reducible to or explainable in terms of their material components alone (assuming they have any).
For example, those empirical phenomena known as organic systems in nature have a material basis, but they cannot be completely explained in terms of their observable materiality alone. What cannot be directly observed and measured here is essential to understanding the phenomenon under study. For example, the phenomenon's organizational principles — which are ineluctably non-observable.
Capice?
It’s a methodology of observation and emopirical measurement. That means it’s only going to work on what can be observed and measured.
Boy, this looks like a study in how to convolute, complicate, and confuse something that is relatively simple. ID is such a simple notion which opponents are unable to refute. Refuting ID is kind of like trying to refute the idea that a car had an intelligent, purposeful designer.
It would apply equally to either half of the hair.
Not everything that exists can be directly "observed and measured." For instance, the physical laws themselves. And yet without the physical laws, science would have nothing to do.
The physical laws are artificial constructs we've created, like mathematics.
I had thought the scientific method was about empirical phenomena; i.e., not simply "material" phenomena. Empirical phenomena are not necessarily completely reducible to or explainable in terms of their material components alone (assuming they have any).
If it's not explainable, then no methodology is going to work, so changing it isn't going to help.
Would you agree that science can help humans make much better guesses (about things for which we have not yet figured out how to do a measurement/observation over) based upon the data collected through the methodology? You’re surely not trying to limit scientists to those returns from measurement and observation. I mean, quantum mechanics is based upon the notion that there are ‘things’ unobservable which only statistical probabilities can make room for in the calculations!
It seems to me that true science should be what is found after an unbiased and generally approved scientific method tests a theory without any agenda. History shows that science with an agenda fails becasue it won't accept verified results that don't conform to looked-for results.
I believe one way or the other, true science will always end up discovering what the Bible has said all along. If there's disharmony, it's either because of a flawed understanding of the Bible or, more recently, an atheistic bias.
Good one. True in science and in life.
Is that anything like species jumping?
Certainly. That happens a lot. New technology will often produce ways of observing and measuring phenomona that simply were't possible before and existing theories compared to new information when it becomes available. Those theories are developed based on information we know, and a measure of a theories validity is it's ability to predict what future information will show when we have the tools to get it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.