I don’t think so. They certainly acknowledge that science has methodological constraints. But “reality” is a matter for philosophers not scientists, so scientists need not acknowledge any such thing about “reality.” It is enough for scientists that they have tested their hypotheses and found written procedures that give the same results no matter what you want or believe.
If some scientists go beyond their expertise to spout their own philosophical or theological opinions then that is their prerogative because expertise on such philosophical or theological issues is not objectively measurable. Obviously it is also our prerogative to point out that their scientific expertise does not transfer over to their less informed opinions.
Personally, I certainly agree that science does not provide a complete picture of reality. And I agree that if scientists are going to spout opinions about the limits of reality then they should honest about the fact that they are not doing science anymore.
Naturalism of the gaps??? We have no reasonable expectation that science will ever be able to show that naturalism is incorrect. Especially if naturalism is that science is to be equated with reality. In that case the very idea is not even coherent. The only gap involved is the gap I have already described between science and life. But if naturalism works for their life, then most we can say is that they should be too surprised if their children do not come to the same conclusion.
Evolution of the gaps??? The evidence for evolution is overwhelming – it is not a matter of philosophical arguments. It is only what is reasonable to believe given all the evidence. Certainly it more reasonable than constructing some liar god theology to sweep all this evidence under.
Curiously silent??? Why should they devote their efforts according to your interests rather than theirs? Defending theology is not the task of philosophers of science. And pointing out the flaws in the arguments of naturalists is of course the task of those like you and me, who disagree with them.
That rings a bell. If I ever win the lottery and can go back to study for a master’s degree, I would so like to draw a line between the moral contradiction of treating people like they don’t exist when you believe they do, and Kant’s Categorical Imperative.
I only got into MacIntyre until just recently, but I did have John Piper’s Desiring God when taking an intro to ethics. What an important and apparently overlooked text on ethics. “The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying him forever.”
Sorry to derail you any further! But I have to ask if you have any love for James Smith as a philosopher? John Betz?
Or you can look up normative ethics. The usual proposed solutions to the question of how we determine right from wrong are…
Aristotle’s virtue ethics
Kant’s deontological ethics
The consequentialist and utilitarian ethics of Mill and others.
I agree with @Paulm12 that virtue ethics is the way to go. The problem with consequentialism is that we simply don’t have to ability to control the consequences of our actions. Kant’s use of duty and reason is better, but too easily subverted. In the end, what matters is what kind person we see when we look at ourselves in the mirror. We have to live with ourselves.
I agree. But I also think this cuts both ways: science will never be able to show that theism is correct/incorrect either. So it is misleading for public figures of science to suggest that atheism and science are somehow implied by one another.
My claim is people who claim to be “defenders of science” or representatives of science should to be quick to point out nonsense wherever it comes from if they claim to represent the face of science education. To only focus their attention on one side of the issue while spouting nonsense of their own is only going to decrease public trust in science. Then again, they don’t necessarily have any detailed responsibility to the effects of their argument on public trust in science. Still, Dawkins et. al love to complain about public trust in science and blame it on “creationist nonsense.” I agree, but I think he has his own part to play in the problem. Coyne, Dennet, and the New Atheist rhetoric contribute to making science look like an ideological battleground. If this is all science is (as some philosophers of science claim, see the New Cynics) with no special epistemic authority, then perhaps (reluctantly) I’ll admit it deserves to be knocked down a few pegs in terms of respect and trust.
When I say “Evolution of the Gaps,” I’m specifically referring to Darwinian explanations of things that happened in the past (evolutionary accounts for religion, consciousness, etc) that have no reasonable falsifiability criterion. These are not in line with the methodology of science you detailed above. I (perhaps somewhat controversially) am open to them being considered “scientific” because they extrapolate the methodological naturalism done when testing hypothesis to give an explanation in terms of (current, working) theory. However if these speculative accounts are considered scientific because they fall in line with the findings of modern science, this opens the door to ID being considered scientific as well by the same argument.
When I see popular science educators using the name of “science” to advocate atheism, and not only try to combat religion but do so in a belittling and contemptuous way, I am not surprised when conservatives who would claim they have a phenomenological experience with religion would be increasingly wary of any recommendations to “scientific authority,” including vaccines, evolution, etc. If they don’t think science communicators and educators know what they are talking about with regards to what they know to be true, why should they trust them on other issues? Granted, I’m simplifying this argument quite a bit. Still, (as one very conservative family member asked me) if other scientists are not willing to speak out against nonsense scientists say on matters outside their area of expertise, why should the public trust scientists to do this in the peer review process (which is mostly hidden from them, behind paywalls, etc)? I am grateful for OpenReview.
Honestly these names are pretty foreign to me so I’ll have to look them up. Any recommendations on books or articles?
What is so interesting to me is realizing how deeply Christian Kant’s Categorical Imperative is. In essence it tries to give a (rational) account for The Golden Rule. Like you said it’s easy to subvert. I read a really interesting book that made a suggestion that enlightenment philosophers tried too hard to “systematize” morality, and hence consequentialism and modern Deontology may be misguided in it’s attempt to reduce morality to a single rule or axis. Indeed findings from moral psychology seems to imply there are different moral principles, with harm/fairness not being the only one for many people.
Betz is an associate professor of Systematic and Philosophical Theology at Notre Dame. I found him in a conversation on the Mars Hill Audio Journal. His work on Hamann was of immediate interest to me.
A quote I pulled from the conversation:
In J.G. Hamann’s view, the subject of Betz’s book After Enlightment, “The self designated enlighteners of the 18th century… were not messianic saviors to a world lying in darkness, in a secular parody of religious expectation, but hypocritical demagogues masquerading as angels of light.”
For Hamann, “The term enlightment suggested the supernatural presence of transcendence shining in the darkness, like the light of the star of Bethlehem, in any event, something more than reason alone can grasp or anticipate. In short theirs was the light of an auto-illumination, his, the illuminating supernatural presence of the gift of the Holy Spirit apart from whom our reasonings are proportionately dark, debilitated, and confused. As the Psalmist says, ‘In thy light, we see light’ Psalm 36:9.”
For James Smith, he has a bunch of stuff out there. I wouldn’t know where to begin. If you like Piper’s Desiring God I can recommend something in particular. Otherwise this was a talk he gave with Francis Collins not too long ago:
I was hooked the moment I read these words from Piper:
You might turn the world on its head by changing one word in your creed. The old tradition says:
The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
And? Like ham and eggs? Sometimes you glorify God and sometimes you enjoy Him? Sometimes He gets glory, sometimes you get joy? And is a very ambiguous word! Just how do these two things relate to each other?
Evidently, the old theologians didn’t think they were talking about two things. They said “chief end,” not “chief ends.” Glorifying God and enjoying Him were one end in their minds, not two. How can that be?
If I were forced to describe science in one sentence . . .
The testing of falsifiable hypotheses with empirical measurements.
The general/fuzzy concept is “If my idea is right, you should be able to observe these facts. If my idea is wrong, you will observe these facts.”
If you have a really, really good idea (i.e. hypothesis, theory) then you will be able to cite many different and independent sets of facts that are consistent with your idea, and cite the experiments where the falsifying observations should have been made if they exist.
One of the keys is empiricism. You need to start with facts that anyone can or could independently verify. This is one of the foundational concepts of science. Before modern science there was a movement called Rationalism which proposed that scientific ideas could be figured out purely by thinking about it. Then came the Empiricists. They rejected the Rationalist concepts and instead asserted that you need to start from objectivity, from empirical measurements. Empiricism was all about recognizing human biases and the fallibility of human intuition.
Before you can test a hypothesis you first have to construct one. That’s how I view the very edges of science, such as theoretical physics. For example, before we could discover the Higgs boson we first had to hypothesize what it was and what it would look like in an experiment. We also had to assign a set of values that would falsify its existence, at least how it was envisioned at that point.
Yes. The very first guideline is whether a new idea can tackle the basic set of observations in a given field. In biology, this would be the nested hierarchy and patterns of sequence conservation/divergence in genomes. I also look to see how risky a hypothesis is. Would any old observation be consistent with the hypothesis? Is there any observation that would be inconsistent with the observation?
As to methodological naturalism, it is entirely required. That is just another name for the scientific method. You can’t do science without the scientific method.
Science takes a bit of personal introspection, in my experience. You have to ask if you are trying to protect an idea, or are you really trying to disprove your idea with as much vigor as you are trying to prove it right. If you start with an idea that you have decided just can’t be false, that’s a problem, at least a scientific problem. This results in all sorts of ad hoc rescues and just bad science.
The general consensus starts with “this is the evidence”. It then moves to “these are our falsifiable hypotheses”. It’s that second step which causes many problems in creationism and ID. The supernatural, by definition, is unfalsifiable. It just doesn’t work in science. When any outcome of an experiment can be chalked up to “I guess God decided to do it that way” then there is no science to do. Science stops. When the distance to another galaxy is thrown out because God could have just invented the starlight to show a distant galaxy, then how are you able to do science? If God can create species in a way that exactly mimics evolution for no apparent reason, then how are we supposed to test ID/creationism? If any geologic formation with any characteristic can be consistent with a recent global flood, then how do you do science? If no fossil can ever be considered transitional, no matter what features it has, then how can you do science?
Then you aren’t doing science. You are protecting a belief.
A couple of years ago I got into a phenomenal conversation with someone whose big thing was, “no novel testable prediction, no evidence.” Finally after a lot of back and forth, they claimed M-theory makes novel testable predictions. Irregardless of how an uncaused happening is theorized to be explained by extra dimensional strings, if something just occurs without cause, then there can be no explanation for it.
Now if something is the immediate effect of an uncaused cause, it would then appear to come from nothing or seem acausal.
Unable to imagine a Petri-dish containing “animate science”, I find myself concluding that it must be Inanimate, in which case–given a second pair of categories, i.e. Concrete and Abstract–I find myself forced to conclude that it can only be “Concrete” when written or drawn. Unless and until it is, it must be “Abstract”, it can only be a ‘puff of air’ when spoken or a 'brief movement of hands" when signed. or real when actually done.
I would, however, welcome useful corrections and/or amendments to the foregoing.
Or we educate the public on why none of those were scientific. You might as well have Social Newtonism and throw people off of tall buildings because the science says they should fall. Or Germ Theory insists that microorganisms should cause infections, so we purposefully infect people because the science demands it.
None of which impacts the vast, vast majority of science. A virologist is not considering the origin of the universe when they are trying to determine what makes one virus more virulent than another.
The metaphysics of science is pretty simple, and even some of those concepts are checked against evidence. For example, the laws of nature don’t change willy nilly. We won’t be walking down a sidewalk where the laws of thermodynamics suddenly break down and create a vacuum that suffocates us, as one example. The tensile strength of steel won’t suddenly change as I try to apply pressure to my brake pedal and stop my car. Scientists also think that nature is understandable, because if it wasn’t why do science.
Very good points. The difficulty here is we tend to choose hypothesis in a way so they can be tested. Or (what I sometimes do) is set up experiments that will shine some insight on something whether it is conclusive or not. I try to be careful not to believe the outcome too strongly because I am (perhaps somewhat superstitious) I will find or construct confirming evidence for a belief. In other words, I can perform a test without having a hypothesis either way. Once I start repeating experiments, I try to refine what exactly my hypothesis covers.
The challenge I see in methodological naturalism is it is difficult to pin down what “naturalism” actually entails. Many scientific experiments seem to proceed under the assumption (or behave under assumptions) that moral facts exist (hence designing experiments and hypothesis under the constraints of ethics boards), that mathematical facts exist. Obviously when I perform an experiment, I am assuming that God/gods/ghosts/spirits/etc aren’t “intervening” on behalf of these results (even if some experiments, like double-blind prayer experiments, can claim to shine light on these questions; whether these are “scientific” is another debate). I wonder if results from quantum mechanics sort of undermine these assumptions too: is “observation” considered a supernatural property?
In most scientific endeavors (mine included) there are a host of philosophical assumptions that we tend to make. These include ideas such a theory of time, causation, the existence of the past. If these are assumed but are not reducible to natural properties, then this would undermine the idea that methodological naturalism is necessary to science. Your post made me think up the following question which I am not able to currently answer:
If I seek a “natural” explanation for causes, but these explanations involve the use of abstract mathematical theories or principles (assumed by a majority of the people who study and discover these principles to exist independently of the natural world [1]) like set theory, Cantor’s ideas about infinity, etc, is my explanation/assumption really [methodologically] natural?
