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 .
WHY would you want to put the donkey and the rider “on the same plane,”such that they equally could be made subject to “true/false” arguments?
Because...... of my friends and family their donkeys are indeed riding the rider...
With their life force logic as flawed as a tortoise surfing on it’s shell.. yelling kiwabunga..
I know few people that think more deeply than a chimpanzee..
Sure they speak language, play games, fornicate, and the smart ones can fish termites out with a stick...
But I suppose some are on the level of a Gibbon.. or even a Lemur..
Chimp being a step “UP”...
They do indeed have a logic... they think.. they consider..
But the quality of their considerations seem to be second reality..
People can be logically WRONG “you know”..
Very logical except it’s just partially or completely WRONG..
I’m starting to believe there is a plateau of logic....
1) first reality logic...
2) second reality logic...
2) and third reality logic..
** there may be other levels I am unaware of.. -OR-
degrees of gradation within levels..
How did I get so smart.?..
NOW that would be a logical and very good question..
***
I never quite got the hang of this idea that you cannot know anything about something without first knowing how it came to be. You repeat that mantra over and over, but never explain why it must be in that order.
BECAUSE...........
The “something” you are trying to know about could be BuLL Sperm..
It’s good to where the “thing” came from.. before being inseminated..
Of all the things you could choose for a hobby, it had to be fearmongering.
Of all the things you could choose for a hobby, it had to be fearmongering.
I choose to look it as courage sculpting..
Just what we need. More creative semantics.
Spirited: "Man is said to be made in God's image," said St. Thomas Aquinas, "insofar as the image implies an intelligent being endowed with free-will and self-movement."
The biblical view of man is that, while made in God's spiritual image, in contrast to God, man is fallen. His intellect and passions are disordered by sin even though sin does not obliterate his God-like powers of free will and intellect. Thus humans can, by God's grace, understand what is good and choose to do what is good, or turn away from God and willfully choose to do what they know to be wrong.
Most research analysts of the destructive "isms" and "magic science" that emerged out of the Renaissance agree that these spiritual poisons were undergirded and fueled by a rebellion against God, the human condition and mortality.
By the time of the Enlightenment, rebels (dreamers) realized that the only avenue of escape was by way of integration with nature (second reality). Lester Crocker explains:
"There existed in the eighteenth century a widespread desire to equate the moral with the physical world..." What was desired above all was "total integration of man in nature, with refusal of any transcendence, even though it was admitted that (being God's image-bearer) gave him certain special abilities and ways of thinking. The important thing, as La Mettrie, d'Holbach and others made clear, is that he is submitted to the same laws; everything is response to need — mechanically... like a tree or a machine. Man merely carries out natural forces — without any freedom whatsoever — in all he does, whether he loves or hates, helps or hurts, gives life or takes it."(Monsters from the Id, E. Michael Jones, pp. 5, 7)
Long before Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the Marquis de Sade had put this way of thinking into action.
Early Church Father Athanasius explains both the human condition and the fatal consequences of rejecting our Creator in favor of nature worship (i.e., self, animated matter, energy, water, fire, air).
God has made man, and willed that he should abide in incorruption; but men, having despised and rejected the higher things of God, devised and contrived evil for themselves, thereby receiving,
"... the condemnation of death with which they had been threatened; and from thenceforth no longer remained as they were made, but were being corrupted according to their devices; and death had the mastery over them as king."
Transgression of the commandments of God was effectively turning them back to their natural state,
"....so that just as they have had their being out of nothing, so also, as might be expected, they might look for corruption into nothing in the course of time. For if, out of a former normal state of non-existence they were called into being by the Presence and loving-kindness of the Word, it followed naturally that when men were bereft of the knowledge of God and were turned back to what was not (for what is evil is not, but what is good is), they should, since they derive their being from God who IS, be everlastingly bereft even of being; in other words, that they should be disintegrated and abide in death and corruption. For man is by nature mortal, inasmuch as he is made out of what is not; but by reason of his likeness to Him that is (and if he still preserved this likeness by keeping Him in his knowledge) he would stay his natural corruption, and remain incorrupt; as Wisdom 6:18 says: “The taking heed to His laws is the assurance of immortality" but being incorrupt, he would live henceforth as God, to which I suppose the divine Scripture refers, when it says: “I have said you are gods, and you are all sons of the most Highest; but you die like men, and fall as one of the princes.” (On the Incarnation of the Word, Athanasius)
To say to God, "you are not my Father" is to disintegrate and abide in death and corruption even though you are still alive and cannot see the effects of disintegration. Tolkien ingeniously makes 'visible' the invisible process of disintegration with Grimma Wormtongue, Gollum and others.
The Word has said:
"..... I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing, therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live; that you may love the Lord your God, that you may obey His voice, and that you may cling to Him, for He is your life..." Deuteronomy 30:19-20
The Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Word become Flesh, Jesus Christ the Physician came to heal the spiritually sick. But whoever rejects the Physician, whether through indifference or outright denial, rejects His prescription, hence destroys him or herself.
Destruction however, does not mean annihilation of the soul as is commonly thought today. The soul though immortal, said St. Augustine, nevertheless suffers a kind of death when the living God forsakes it:
"...in that penal and everlasting punishment....the soul is...said to die because it does not live in connection with God (meaning that) though man does not cease to feel, yet because this feeling is neither sweet... nor wholesome (but) painfully penal, it is (called) death rather than life." (St. Augustine's City of God, Chapter 2, Of that Death Which Can Affect an Immortal Soul, and of that to Which the Body is Subject)
Hi tacticalogic! I'll try to explain.
First of all, I take it that we are speaking about rationality — in nature, and in the human mind. If there were no correspondence between the two, science would be impossible. To put it another way, to say that nature is "rational" is to say that it is capable of being understood by the human mind.
But how does this fortunate situation come about?
Methodological/metaphysical materialists hold that everything in nature is the result of the undirected evolution of matter; life and mind spontaneously emerged from pre-biotic chemicals. Everything that occurs is the result of chance and time. Given enough time, the occurrence of anything at all is possible; and what is possible is very likely probable sooner or later. If you have infinite time, anything can happen and likely will happen.
The problem with that expectation is that time is not infinite. There is increasingly solid consensus in the scientific community today that the universe had a beginning in time. Therefore, the material universe is finite. It follows that what has a beginning has an end.
But in an exclusively material evolution, life and mind would essentially be lucky (for us) "accidents of nature" that happened to persist after having been developed by a blind, accidental process (reinforced presumably by natural selection in the interest of the survival of the fittest). But by what criterion of rational judgment does an accidental mind evaluate an accidental universe, such to gain understanding of it? How does the accidental mind gain understanding of its own etiology and "structure?"
So to get back to your statement, "I don't need any proof at all that 'survival is rational'." Well it's a good thing you don't require "proof," because from your own presuppositions you will never find it. An infinite congeries of accidents doesn't prove anything on the basis of logic and reason. Not to mention that "proof" is a term usually confined to logic and mathematics. How does an accidental universe generate such things?
To repeat what you wrote:
I never quite got the hang of this idea that you cannot know anything about something without first knowing how it came to be. You repeat that mantra over and over, but never explain why it must be in that order.Because that is the order in which the human mind works??? Science does its work by explaining natural phenomena in terms of the causal chain that produced them. There can be no infinite regression of causes in a finite universe....
Hope this helps. Thanks for writing!
By my understanding of the terms methodological and metaphysical you are conflating them to make methodologcial materialism appear to be metaphysical. What is the differenece between those two terms, according to the definitions you're using?
Seems to me there is a difference of degree but not of quality between them. It seems to me the important thing to notice is both are variants of materialism. If your objection is to metaphysical materialism, but you think methodological materialism is okay — because it's "scientific" — you may have missed the point that materialism itself is a philosophical school doctrine, "the theory or belief that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications."
How methodologically scientific is that? It seems to start out with a conclusion....
But how can anything be discovered if it is ruled out as a matter of principle in the first place?
Can you tell me why science embraced empricism and the scientific method, and what the consequences of rejecting it and going back to the way research was pursued prior to it’s adoption would be?
There is an ideology in our contemporary debates about philosophy, theology and science that coheres remarkably well, but is not often examined as a coherent ideology.
That coherent ideology wraps together materialism, atheism and Darwinism. M-A-D. They form a triad with an internal dynamic that sustains the ideology. For brevity, I'll call the ideology by the acronym MAD.
Materialism is the metaphysical view that the only existent is matter in motion, and that the natural world is merely the physical world, which is causally closed. Materialism is essentially physicalism and naturalism, and for purposes of the contemporary debate can be considered interchangeable. The triad of physicalism-atheism-Darwinism ("Ph-A-D") provides an acronym barely less amusing than that of materialism-atheism-Darwinism , proving again the bottomless well of humor that is materialist ideology.
Atheism is of course the view that no gods exist. It rescues materialism from the quasi-materialist deities of Mt. Olympus, which some early materialists accepted but which would prove embarrassing to materialist cognoscenti today.
Darwinism is the view that life arose by a process of natural selection -- the relative reproductive profligacy of matter bumping into matter. MAD philosophers and cosmologists have even proposed an Anthropic-Darwinian model of a "Multiverse," in which "survivors" are those universes that become self-aware. Darwinism is materialism's creation myth.
In the particular debates in which MAD proponents participate, materialism, atheism and Darwinism play their respective roles, depending on the philosophical, theological or scientific issue at hand. But we must not forget that the ideologies in the MAD triad explain and reinforce each other, and each is only understandable in light of the others.
Yet there is a hierarchy in MAD. Materialism is the core of MAD ideology. Atheist theology and Darwinist creation mythology sustain materialism in the minds of those with faith in it. The belief that the only reality is matter in motion is hardly new; it is perhaps the oldest purely metaphysical stance still held by a significant number of people today, having originated in the Axial Age in the 5th century BC with Democritus and Epicurus.
Yet materialism is probably the least defended redoubt of MAD. Books and blogs abound on atheism and Darwinism, but only a few intrepid MAD'ers actually venture a sustained defense of materialism. The reason probably has less to do with materialism's prodigious susceptibility to critique than to materialism's transparency to ridicule.
In sum: Materialism is the belief that the only reality is matter in motion. Atheism is materialism's theology, and Darwinism is materialism's creation myth. They have risen, and will fall, together.
See also: John Wheeler (1911–2008) summarizes his life in physics
What great physicists have said about immateriality and consciousness
(1) ... why [did] science embrace empiricism and the scientific method?
(2) ... what [would be] the consequences of rejecting [the scientific method] and going back to the way research was pursued prior to its adoption?...
RE (1): From what I understand, Sir Francis Bacon [1561–1626] — who is usually credited as the founder of the modern scientific (empirical) method — proposed to replace the deductive, syllogistic mode of logical reasoning advanced by Aristotle and the Mediaeval scholastic thinkers with a new inductive approach.
Rather than deductive reasoning from given propositions (syllogism), which seems not ever directly to touch on actual phenomena that we observe ("sense"), Bacon thought that if one wants to understand the cause of some phenomenon — and he at least seems to be suggesting that if you want to know what a thing is, you do have to know its causal pedigree (so to speak) — the best way to proceed is to collect data and construct tables reflecting the observed presence or absence of the phenomenon in question, then to compare the respective tables. This practice would be the means of terminating the "infinite error" that syllogistic reasoning seems in his mind to perpetuate.
As Bacon put it (in The Great Instauration),
...I am laboring to lay the foundation, not of any sect or doctrine, but of human utility and power.... [I]t seeks for the sciences not arrogantly in the little cells of human wit, but with reverence in the greater world....Yet later he adds:
I reject ... demonstration by syllogism, as acting too confusedly, and letting nature slip out of its hands....
...[T]he greatest change I introduce is in the form itself of induction and the judgment made thereby....
Now what the sciences stand in need of is a form of induction which shall analyze experience and take it to pieces, and by a due process of exclusion and rejection lead to an inevitable conclusion....
...I hold that true logic ought to enter the several provinces of sciences armed with a higher authority than the principles of those sciences themselves [e.g., methodological materialism], and ought to call those putative principles to account until they are fully established. [Please note: methodological materialists routinely dispense with this requirement.]... For certain it is that the senses deceive: but then at the same time they supply the means of discovering their own errors....RE (2): Is this a trick question??? Who is proposing that "empiricism and the scientific method" ought to be abolished, that we might "go back" to the "way research was pursued" before Bacon came along? Certainly not me!The sense fails in two ways. Sometimes it gives no information, sometimes it gives false information.... [I]t is a great error to assert that the sense is the measure of things....
In the first place, little, if any "research" as we moderns understand that term, can be conducted on the basis of logical deduction alone. That is a situation where you have a "mill," but no "grist" for it to "grind."
Secondly, there is no reason to say that deduction vs. induction is some kind of a zero-sum game: where one is the "right way" and the other the "wrong way."
I daresay if you actually were to analyze your own thought processes, you would find that sometimes you think inductively, and sometimes you think deductively. You go back and forth all the time, seamlessly. Which mode you're operating in at a given point of time depends on the nature of the problem you're dealing with at that time.
Thirdly, Bacon's method indubitably did vastly increase the "human utility [of nature] and [human] power." This is not NECESSARILY a bad thing. But that discussion is beyond the present scope here; for that would take us into the moral realm....
To boil it all down, to me Aristotle's "deduction" and Bacon's "induction" are simply different logical tools. Which tool you use depends on the nature of the job.
What we do not want to have, however, is a knee-jerk preference for a tool just because it's familiar. This situation has been described as, "If all you've got is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail."
I would not have a single problem whatsoever with methodological materialism except for its deeply-engrained belief that everything in nature is some kind of species of "nail."
Must leave it there for now, dear tacticalogic. Thank you so much for writing!
OK. Describe a screwdriver, and tell me how to make one.
Do you realize how silly this, your request, is?
Had you actually understood what I wrote, you wouldn't be asking that question.
Actually, it occurs to me that you tend NOT to ask questions. You make statements, demands....
Which seem to end up as diversions.
WHAT do you want from me?
Methodological materialism is a 'tool' that carries the philosophical baggage of atheism. I believe it brings no benefit and puts unnecessary limits on science - it should be discarded and I see no need for it to be replaced with anything. It tries to explain away the Big Bang and a universe fine tuned for life with the 'multiverse' - the only merit to the multiverse theory is that it means there is a universe somewhere out there where Richard Dawkins is a rabid Creationist - but it's still ultimately meaningless. Look how methodological materialism tries to explain away human consciousness with no free-will or 'self' - which means no responsibility. Look how it compares human and chimp DNA as if we could compare the moon landing with flinging poo at one another.
I want you to explain exactly what it is you want from everyone else. You complain about the way they're doing things, by cannot describe exactly what it is they should be doing different, and how they should do it.
A classic bar drink made with orange juice and vodka...
If I add milk of magnesia, will it be a Phillips screwdriver?
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