For what purpose would one construct such a presupposition?
For what purpose would one construct such a presupposition?
Hubris.. let yer mouth form the “H”... now follow me..
H.U.B.R.I.S... now wasn’t that easy?..
I wouldn’t agree that the reason we “cannot find agreement on the questions to be asked” is because we “are not working on the same problem.” Rather, I believe the difficulty arises because we are not standing on the same “ground of being.”
You may be asking different questions than I ask; but in the end, you still have the problem of qualifying and validating the answers you receive, just as I do. You cannot divorce science from Truth — of which God, not man, is the Measure.
In an earlier post, you wondered why anyone would want to “construct” a scientific model in which everything bottoms out in atoms. I alleged that this is precisely what materialist/mechanist/naturalist presuppositions logically lead to.
But then, maybe we need to agree on exactly what it is that “naturalism” involves. It seems to me there are “natural” phenomena which have non-observable causes. Such causes are typically denied as "realizable" in Nature by persons of materialist/mechanist/naturalist persuasion in principle, which placies them outside the scientific method entirely. But the point is, they’d still be natural phenomena — despite the fact that science is prohibited from investigating them.
Which so far is probably all as clear as mud to you, dear tacticalogic. Please allow me to clarify.
What is striking about your and BroJoeK’s arguments is the evident agreement between you regarding the absolute separability of the “super-natural” from the “natural” world. You see these “worlds” as mutually-exclusive domains according to the logic of Aristotle’s Third Law, and classical (i.e., Newtonian) physics. Then you maintain that science has to pick one and reject the other in order to do its work. So the “super-natural” gets dumped, never to be seen again....
From my perch, I see the supernatural and the natural not as separable, mutually exclusive categories, but as the ultimate complementarity constituting the natural world of which human beings are “parts and participants.”
The idea of complementarity arises from Niels Bohr’s uncertainty principle. I honor Bohr as one of the greatest epistemologists of all time IMHO and as founding father of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Investigators of quantum phenomena early on were confronted with a horrifying, mystifying dilemma: They found it impossible, under experimental conditions, to simultaneously quantify both the position and the velocity of a sub-atomic particle (usually a photon). Thus the experimental observer was confronted with a choice: “Respecting this particle, do I want to find out its position or its velocity? ’Cause I can't quantify these two principal variables at the same time.”
Thus the human subjective observer was ineluctably inserted into the very heart of science. (It is to be noted that Einstein had done the same in his General Relativity theory not too long before.)
Here’s something I regard as very important: Bohr himself did not like the term, “uncertainty principle.” He reasoned: A condition of “uncertainty” could be resolved by the acquisition of further relevant knowledge.
But that would not describe what Bohr found: The “condition” we are trying to describe here cannot in principle be resolved by any further acquisition of knowledge. We are speaking of a limitation on human perception (and thus apperception) itself. Bohr thought the problem is not one of “uncertainty”; it is a problem of undecidability.
An insight further supported by Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem….
A condition of “undecidability” is one in which no matter how much additional knowledge of the world one acquires, one will never be able to answer an “undecidable” question.
So Bohr preferred the term, “undecidability principle.” It did not stick.
But I digress. At the very heart of the idea of complementarity is this: The two sides of the complementarity are only mutually-exclusive in an experimental situation, as conceived by an observer. This is not a question begging for a “true–false,” “yes–no” answer, á la Aristotle’s Third Law. For complementarity regards both “sides” as potentially true — under the given experimental conditions. Though you can’t have “both at once,” you need both to describe the total system which they together comprise.
So that’s why I suggested a while back, dear tacticalogic, that although machines and computers may thrive on maximal “computability” — which Aristotle’s Third definitely maximally promotes — this may not be a good model for biology.
Well I suppose to you, dear friend, this thread has been about the defense of Darwin and of modern science itself.
For me, it’s been a plea for the restoration of sanity to modern science.
Darwin definitely needs “updating”: It’s as if his evolutionary theory rationalizes Nature into some kind of biological machine. Plus its Achilles Heel has always been its total silence on origin issues….
But I continue to suspect there may be something good and worthwhile in the theory. I am sure that what is "true" about it will survive forever more.
What is not true, will perish in time.
I’ll just leave matters there for now, dear tacticalogic. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts.