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 .
Well, you said:
When methodological materialism is a belief, the one so believing is ill.
If you'd said "When materialism is a belief, the one so believing is ill."
That would have a plain meaning.
"Methodologcial materialism as a belief", using "belief" theologcially, I get something akin to saying mathematics is a religion.
I would however say that the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics is God’s copyright notice on the Cosmos.
That's a nice platitude, but the point is that both mathematics and methodological naturalism are both just abstract constructs that are used as investigative tools. They aren't theology.
Philosophical Materialism is a belief system.
Methodolical Materialism is an investigative methodology.
Methodological Materialism becoming a belief would be Philosophical Methodological Materialism, and is rubbish.
Great observation, dear spirited. Except the materialist likely would quibble with you about matter having been "created." It is uncreated; it simply "is." Period.
There's an analogy that might shed some light on the insufficiency of materialist explanation. Evolutionary biologists of the persuasion indicated in the above italics tend to admire "the machine metaphor." One hears of the "machinery" of the living cell, etc.; even of the brain as "a meat machine." The machine metaphor seems to them a good way to account for organic matter "in its motions."
I gather they like the machine metaphor because its presumes machines are merely a collection of material parts. If you "fractionate" the machine into its various material components and study each of the components, then at the end of your analysis you can add up all the information regarding the component parts, with the expectation that you have captured complete information about the whole system constituted by the many parts.
But such a presupposition strikes me as ludicrous. It sees the machine only as a collection of material components — to me, itself a very reductionist idea of "machine."
What this concept of "machine" ignores are at least two indisputable and indispensable facts about machines: (1) all machines are purpose-built. That is, they are constructed to accomplish some goal, end or function (final cause). (2) Machines do not construct themselves: They are always found to have been designed and built by intelligent agents (formal cause).
In short, you can't even explain what a machine is in terms of material and efficient causes only.
But if you put the formal and final causes back into the reductionist machine model, you end up by making ID at the very least plausible.
And this cannot be allowed.
So it seems to me that applying the reduced machine analogy — only material and efficient causes allowed — as a framework for understanding living systems, is bound to come up seriously short WRT gaining actual understanding of living systems in nature.
But ideologues never let facts stand in their way....
Thank you so much for writing, dear sister in Christ!
Who sees reality more clearly: Someone who looks at the world, and chooses to believe in a living personal God based on what they see, or someone who starts with having been taught someone else’s theology and looking at the world through it?
YOU avoid the question by providing a “Straw Man”... i.e. #259
Very weak... Mr. “T”..
LOL ... the machine exists, in the mind of the materialist, whether they will admit it or not, as a result of magic! Magic thinking will allow for many explanations, all of which terminate or are sourced in an initial point of magic.
I would however say that the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics is God’s copyright notice on the Cosmos.
Let’s see.... 2 + 2 is ALWAYS 4 ..... Unless you are WRONG..
Right and Wrong DO indeed exist.. unless you’re delusional..
In short, you can’t even explain what a machine is in terms of material and efficient causes only.
Thats true IF you overlook the Rube-Goldberg Machine(s)..
Which are cartoons of Intelligent Design... Materialist Comedy..
Dialectical final cause snark... like evolution...
bonus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKpxd8hzOcQ
Outstanding observation, dear brother in Christ!
"Magical thinking" is solipsistic thinking:
Solipsism; from Latin (solus, meaning "alone", and ipse, meaning "self"). [1] is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure. The external world and other minds cannot be known, and might not exist outside the mind. As a metaphysical position, solipsism goes further to the conclusion that the world and other minds do not exist. As such it is the only epistemological position that, by its own postulate, is both irrefutable and yet indefensible in the same manner.The magical act is sourced and does terminate "in an initial point of magic" — in the "magic word" — of the magician. Magicians construct illusions, or false realities, for the purpose of persuading us they are real. They might just as well: they consider there's nothing demonstrably "real" outside their own minds anyway.
What I find increasingly troubling is that science seems gradually to be losing its historical self-concept as a collaborative, intergenerational, open search for the truth of natural reality, a search which is ultimately a broadly social enterprise. Both Einstein and Bohr (among many others) conceived of science as ultimately belonging, not to the scientists, but to the people.
What we seem increasingly to be finding nowadays is the cult of expertise, in the form of some kind of closed priesthood, that excoriates and tries to punish all non-comforming views. And such folks regard "the people" as generally ignorant, who wouldn't grasp the glories of what the high priests are working on anyway. So don't let them know what you're doing.
Just dazzle them with your "magic."
But the only thing magic is good for is the construction of Second Realities....
Thank you ever so much, dear brother, for your trenchant observation!
Spirited: The following quotes and commentary will shed light on the situation described by betty:
"I suppose the reason we leaped at the origin of species was because the idea of God interfered with our sexual mores," confessed Sir Julian Huxley, former president of UNESCO and grandson of Darwin's colleague Thomas Huxley. (Henry M. Morris, The Troubled Waters of Evolution, Creation-Life Publishers, 1974, p. 58)
Of Darwin's theory that everything ascended (evolved) upward out of self-generated matter, the great Christian theologian Charles Spurgeon pointedly observed,
"There is not a hair of truth upon this dog from its head to its tail, but it rends and tears the simple ones. In all its bearing upon scriptural truth, the evolution theory is in direct opposition to it. If God's Word be true, evolution is a lie." (Spurgeon, Hideous Discovery, July 25, 1886)
Evolutionist Suzan Mazur seems to agree with Spurgeon. In her book, "The Altenberg 16: An Expose of the Evolution Industry" she looks at the rivalry in contemporary natural science surrounding attempts to discover the elusive process of evolution. Her book openly acknowledges the unresolvable problems surrounding evolution and natural selection and documents these concerns with statements from leading evolutionary scientists. Mazur comments:
"A wave of scientists now questions natural selection's role, though fewer will publicly admit it." (p. 20, "Desperate attempts to discover 'the elusive process of evolution,' reviewed by Walter J. ReMine, Creation Ministries International)
She describes evolutionary science as a modern day quest for the Holy Grail that is very much about posturing, salesmanship, stonewalling and bullying. It is a social discourse involving hypotheses of staggering complexity,
"...with scientists, recipients of the biggest grants of any intellectuals, assuming the power of politicians while engaged in Animal House pie-throwing and name-calling..." (ibid)
Evolution books are hyped like snake oil at a carnival:
"Perhaps the most egregious display of commercial dishonesty is this year's celebration of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, the so-called theory of evolution by natural selection, i.e., survival of the fittest, a brand foisted on us 150 years ago." (ibid)
Mazur admits that genes and natural selection have little to do with long-term changes in populations. Here she not only calls attention to the existing censorship against non-Darwinian ideas but tells us why it happens:
"The commercial media is both ignorant of and blocks coverage of stories about non-centrality of the gene because its science advertising dollars come from the gene-centered Darwin industry. At the same time, the Darwin industry is also in bed with government, even as political leaders remain clueless about evolution. Thus, the public is unaware that its dollars are being squandered on funding of mediocre, middlebrow science or that its children are being intellectually starved as a result of outdated texts and unenlightened teachers." (Mazur, p. ix, ibid)
Wow! That is a powerful “inside look” at the “evolution Industry”...
Can you explain what makes it a "Straw Man" ?
Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dearest sister in Christ!
Can you explain what makes it a “Straw Man” ?
Avoidance........
Evolutionist Suzan Mazur seems to agree with Spurgeon. In her book, “The Altenberg 16: An Expose of the Evolution Industry”
“Evolution Industry”....... What a concept...
This phrase should be used until it becomes threadbare...
And whatever the answer is will be "Projection." SSDD.
Sounds like indoctrination.
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.
Sounds like indoctrination.
Like; 2 + 2 = 4............... should drilled into people...
The Evo Industry has become a conglomerate..
A gigantic scam...
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