I think you have to distinguish between real science, and scientism.
Darwinism is a parody of science, which tends to be a kind of secular religion.
Science is a good deal more open minded and willing to adjust to the realities if a hypothesis proves to be wrong. Darwinists simply cannot get themselves to agree that they possibly could be wrong. Their position is that Darwinism is true, scientific, factual, period, end of conversation. If you disagree, they will call in the activist judges to shut your mouth, because you are deemed unscientific and therefore not worthy to be heard.
I was a math and physics major at Harvard before I changed fields, and I have studied the history of science and philosophy for most of my lifetime. Descartes's mind-body problem is certainly one source of the difficulty. But it goes back even further to John of Ockham's nominalism. This is the illusion that if you can't see and touch something, it's not real. Therefore there is no such thing as a tree, or a maple, or an oak. There are only individual trees, maples, and oaks. The individual is more real than the universal. But paradoxically we can only think in universals.
That soon leads to theories like those mentioned: that we have no free will, no real consciousness, no real intelligence, that all our ideals are really illusions, and so forth. But as Samuel Johnson said, while kicking a stone, "Thus do I refute Berkeley." Anyone with even a dash of sense knows that he has free will, intelligence, choice. It takes a brainwashing education to make people think otherwise, and of course that's why Darwinists want to impose brainwashing educations in the public schools, with no opportunity to discuss whether they are actually real or scientific.
History tells the same story. Science and technology grew up in the west to unprecedented heights BECAUSE of Christianity, not in spite of it, as the pseudoscientists would have people believe. Philosophy, or the love of knowledge, thrived under Christianity long after it died in Greece, and philosophy died in the West precisely because Christianity weakened in intellectual circles.
From my point of view, there is exactly not a single word you wrote that I can disagree with.
Certainly I appreciate the distinction you make between science and scientism -- the latter a bastardized, reduced version of human reason and insight.
Thank you ever so much for your illuminating essay/post!
As always, Cicero, your wise comments are worth re-reading. My grandmother always said our troubles started at the turn of the 20th century when so many intellectuals (so-called) rejected God.
Personally, I think of the afterlife as analogous to the profit motive - - most humans are pretty selfish and the only reason they behave themselves is because they expect to have to answer for it eventually.
Enjoyed this conversation in the corner by the window with Cicero very much! More champagne, anyone? (;
It seems in the long standing crevo wars, we have often written a benediction to a thread that ended with the conclusion that the two sides were hopelessly divided on universals. One side of combatants often take the Aristotle position looking down and giving a hand wave to "threeness" "redness" "treeness" as you say, pointing only to a particular tree or group of trees. The other side takes the Plato position, looking up to the forms themselves.
It is particularly disturbing to me (and fortunately, fairly rare) when mathematicians take the position that universals do not exist. After all, when they name a variable in a formula, they have declared the universality of the formula itself. The “radius” is the same thing or form regardless of what, where, how or when a particular circle might exist – or not. Thus the formula for calculating the area of a circle is portable across every domain.
The same is true with physicists whose concern is the universal theory itself which of course must be portable across every domain as well.
Often lost in the railing back and forth is the simple observation that mathematics is unreasonably effective in the natural sciences (Eugene Wigner) and vice versa (Cumrum Vafa) – S dualities, mirror symmetries, the Mandelbrot set.
The prime example of this phenomenon was that Einstein was able to pull Reimannian geometry off the shelf to describe general relativity. Reiman could not have known the physical universality of the math he discovered!
If a metaphysical naturalist were reasonable in the matter (as compared to ideological or political motived) – he would admit that the phenomenon squarely attests that universals exist and leaves the door wide open to theology and philosophy - in particular, Logos as betty boop has mentioned here.
IMHO, when the biologists invited the mathematicians and physicists to the table, it was a death wish.