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Thank y'all so much for your posts!

betty boop: Science tells us about the physical. To the extent that human persons understand themselves as somehow being more than physical, then science alone will not satisfy the craving, the quest for human understanding of the Truth of reality, by which we humans may truly guide and direct the course of our own self-determined existence.

Indeed! Here's a related excerpt from Whitehead, who coined the term "scientific materialism":

Whitehead

In Process and Reality, rather than assuming substance as the basic metaphysical category, Whitehead introduces a new metaphysically primitive notion which he calls an actual occasion. On Whitehead's view, an actual occasion is not an enduring substance, but a process of becoming. As Donald Sherburne points out, "It is customary to compare an actual occasion with a Leibnizian monad, with the caveat that whereas a monad is windowless, an actual occasion is 'all window.' It is as though one were to take Aristotle's system of categories and ask what would result if the category of substance were displaced from its preeminence by the category of relation …."[5] As Whitehead himself explains, his "philosophy of organism is the inversion of Kant's philosophy … For Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world."[6]

Significantly, this view runs counter to more traditional views associated with material substance: "There persists," says Whitehead, "[a] fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call 'scientific materialism.' Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived."[7]

The assumption of scientific materialism is effective in many contexts, says Whitehead, only because it directs our attention to a certain class of problems that lend themselves to analysis within this framework. However, scientific materialism is less successful when addressing issues of teleology and when trying to develop a comprehensive, intergrated picture of the universe as a whole. According to Whitehead, recognition that the world is organic rather than materialistic is therefore essential, and this change in viewpoint can result as easily from attempts to understand modern physics as from attempts to understand human psychology and teleology. Says Whitehead, "Mathematical physics presumes in the first place an electromagnetic field of activity pervading space and time. The laws which condition this field are nothing else than the conditions observed by the general activity of the flux of the world, as it individualises itself in the events."[8

Doctor Stochastic, you objected to my statement "Scientific materialism demands that the scientist (in the U.S.; I don't get many African or South American articles. ) only consider undirected physical causation." You replied:

This statement is completely at variance with how science is done in the U.S. If it is what you think, you have no understanding at all how scientific organizations work. For one thing, peer-review is international. I review mostly articles from overseas (usually Europe or Asia, rather than the US). Likewise, most of my stuff gets reviewed overseas.

To evaluate your assertion, I'd appreciate it if you would review and refute these two articles which present to the contrary of your view:

Refereed Journals: Do they ensure quality or enforce orthodoxy?

The Twilight of Darwinism at the Dawn of A New Millennium -An Interview with Dr. Paul Chien

On post 1688, I made the following statement:

Scientific materialism demands that the scientist (in the U.S.) only consider undirected physical causation. In short hand, that is the "randomness" pillar of evolution theory: random mutations - natural selection > species

Doctor Stochastic, you objected as follows:

How does this statement even relate the the previous statment? "Randomness" is not a pillar, merely an obervation.

The second sentence of my paragraph is related to the first in the manner described by Whitehead above. Randomness or happenstance - the polar opposite of purpose or direction - is the basis of "scientific materialism".

IMHO, it is also a pillar of evolution theory as it is argued today - simply because, once it is removed, then there is no contention between evolution theory and the intelligent design hypothesis.

IOW, the intelligent design hypothesis does not stipulate a designer - it could be any intelligent cause.

The acceptance that certain features of life v non-life/death in nature are best explained by intelligent cause rather than undirected cause settles the issue.

If the science community is ready to accept that "randomness" is not part of evolution theory, then I suggest we stop posting these threads, ask the school boards to present it accordingly and suggest to the Discovery Institute that they redirect their efforts to other work.

I've read both articles. From the tone, the authors seem to be complaining that they were rejected, so instead of fixing up their research, they complain that other reject them. This isn't uncommon. As I haven't reviewed the papers that were rejected, I don't know if the authors of the articles you cited were justified.

Shoddy research is the third most common reason for rejection, ranking behind bad spelling and bad grammar.

IOW, the intelligent design hypothesis does not stipulate a designer - it could be any intelligent cause.

What would be an intelligent cause that had no designer?

You and Betty are complaining about the peer review process, but I haven't seen you produce a paper that was rejected, along with the review. Did I miss something?