I didn’t address this in another response to me where you took exception to my use of the word but scientism virtually means philosophical naturalism or materialism. It’s in the first line on the wiki:
I guess we can define words how we want but quibbling with others who are using vocabulary correctly is fruitless to me. I see it used this way all the time. It is very common. The person is using the word scientism to mean these things. You may use the word differently but that is irrelevant. I’d say move past it. It’s not the central issue.
Ah yes… it is a second definition in Merriam Webster.
1 methods and attitudes typical of or attributed to the natural scientist
2 an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities)
Of course I am offended that the two should be linked in this way. But this shows that the link has been made by more than just Argon above. Though perhaps you should continue reading the Wikipedia article, which points out that earliest proponent Francis Bacon was a devout Anglican. And then it was used for a critique of logical positivism. But unfortunately as often happens, later philosophers pick up a term and use it differently until the originators complain and try inventing a new word to recapture what they originally meant. We see this with C.S. Pierce and the term “pragmatism” which he later sought to recover with the term “pragmaticism” which I think is best described as the idea that the effect of believing something is part of its truth value. But later philosophers calling themselves pragmatists changed this to a reduction of truth only to what is practical, like with Dewey who changed it into something much like instrumentalism.
Back to “scientism…” We can see “scientism” was later used by others such as Popper more in the manner of the second definition above. So I suppose I must take up my complaint with them, for I think this makes the term practically without any value whatsoever since we already have the word “naturalism” for this. But then I suppose we can point out that “naturalism” also has a number of different definitions also. Human language is often such a blunt tool… argh…
In any case, I have to give you that you make a valid point, and that Argon was using the word according to an established definition. I was jumping on the first definition I saw and should have been more careful. And thus my complaint should have been narrowed to making a distinction between these two different definitions.
I cannot fault your choice – I think there is no doubt which is more important. The tragedy here is that you were made to think you had to choose. The tragedy is Christianity warped into this anti-science thinking which is NOT what Christianity is about. It’s like some cultish idea that wearing red socks is a sin. Such legalism and Gnostic thinking is very far from the Christian gospel.
Hmm M.M…I’m a scientist through and through, so I’m not anti-science.
In fact I continued in science…I became my own experiment, which is still ongoing.
The teachings of Jesus said, leave everything and follow me, so I did.
But it wasn’t that clear cut, there were other factors.
Research was turning in a direction I couldn’t stomach.
I killed lots of rats working on the isolated beating rat heart. Thankfully, when I cut them open,
they were drugged and unconscious. I didn’t want to do in vitro research where you do harm to a to a rat, a living animal, and even dogs were also being studied.
My mom was dying with cancer, so I wanted to go back home to be with her and my father in Roseville, Ca.
I had a tough breakup at the time and needed a change.
I was not responsible for a lab and had lots of workers under me who needed my support through grants I might get.
So here I am today, some 40 plus years later.
If I stayed in science perhaps I would have made other important discoveries like the Mitochondrial Permeability Transition Pore; I was good at making discoveries; I had good scientists/teachers.
But I don’t regret the move, and would have done the same again. So, here I am today, right now,
in Biologos, Hurrah!, not just proclaiming the Good News, but making a case for God the Creator of life through the creation of the Cell.
And here’s another shocker I’ve come up with – God and the Cell are One.
That may explain the mystery of why He created the Cell, in the form of a single celled organism like a bacteria a billion years before…He created/evolved us conscious beings who can appreciate and glorify Him, The Only True God, who lives in us through the cell, as well as in all life forms.
Food for thought…I guess.
That is of course an entirely different matter. I am reminded of John Polkinghorne, quantum physicist who left his science career to become an Anglican priest.
I am retired. I consider my last job to be taking care of my mother – in her case it was just old age.
More of a biological science then. I was in theoretical physics.
Well I don’t agree with that one. I can sort of see the idea… kind of like how God became man in Jesus, right? But no, I don’t think so.
I believe God’s creation of the physical universe was about free will which I think is the essence of life itself. It was one thing to create beings like Himself directly, and that is what the angels are. But the result according to the Bible is servants not children – kind of like computers I think, powerful but limited to what God made them. But the whole reason for the physical universe and its natural laws was to give us a basis of existence apart from Him so that would make our own decisions which are entirely our own. So I think the whole point is that we are a product of self-organization and our own decisions all the way back to the beginning.
My understanding of Genesis 1:27 is that God’s infinite actuality is reflected in our infinite potentiality, because of our basic ability to become more than we are. It is the nature of life to grow and learn, creating ourselves with our own decisions. And in this way we would truly be children rather than biological machines designed by God and thus only able to do what God made us to do. In the way God did it, we are made for an eternal parent-child relationship with God with no end to what God can give to us and no end to what we can receive from Him.
Could we say philosophical naturalism is more of a metaphysical stance whereas scientism is more an epistemological approach to reality (a self-defeating one at that)?
I use materialism/scientism/philosophical naturalism interchangeably even though there seem to be slight differences in how they are defined.
No one should have an issue with the first one.
There is a lot of baggage that has led to the perceived conflict model between religion and science today. For me it’s just a second, more modern definition. The meaning of words changes over time. I find the first definition somewhat redundant. We use “science” and “scientist” to convey those ideas. I’ve only ever encountered “scientism” mentioned in the second sense in the modern literature I read.
Science has absolutely become a religion for many.
Close enough for me. I think science depends on naturalism, that is, that observations have natural causes, whereas philosophical naturalism expands that to areas that science cannot truly address, topics like good, evil, love etc.
Can you clarify? I’m not thinking you believe in pantheism or anything related to it. The Creator is not the same as His created. I’d be afraid, moreover, of calling any miracle (if we could identify it as such) as the same as God. In a way, we could say all of creation is a miracle.
Thanks.
I’m just trying to make sense of the data.
Why would God create the Cell, as a single cell living organism, a bacteria, and then wait or take
a billion years to bring us humans with our 30 trillion cells and who can acknowledge and worship Him, into existence?
It must be that the Cell, life itself, is of supreme importance.
A manifestation of God…God and the Cell are One…or something like that…
Here is a very good example of the cart getting way before the horse. And the perils of using 20th and 21st-century knowledge to explain scripture.
God must have created cells, because he created everything else.
The Book of Genesis was finally polished up around 586-538 BCE. The embedded meaning of the text can only be examined in the light of knowledge, and history, possessed at that time.
Plus, it is rather confusing when commentary is placed in the context that science is wrong, but you attempt to use science in refuting science. Things do not work that way.
We know what is in the cell and the components of the cell and organelles, because science has told us what is there. The writers of Genesis had no such knowledge, nor could have they been expected to “figure it out” given the facts at the time.
And to imply that “well God knew about it”, is to beg the question. If so, then why couldn’t God have told us much sooner?
I don’t much like @biochemist doug’s idea either. But I don’t think it is right to make all of theology about interpreting scripture. He made no reference to scripture in this. For me his idea is too strange of a mixture of science with creationism, where all of God’s creation must be these instantaneous magical interventions popping things into existence. It frankly implies that we are not creations of God ourselves because God did not magically pop us into existence.
In any case, the findings of science is otherwise, that every new thing is an alteration of what went before. There is no first cell any more than there is a first egg before a chicken. Instead we see a gradual change from something less like the egg or cell we know to something more like what we are familiar with. The sharp lines are superficial artifacts of language. We decide to define our words revolving around one little detail which we often find are not even one thing at all but a collection of things working together so we end up making our definitions revolve around more and more insignificant details.
In this case before the endosymbiosis of bacteria and archaea there was a more parasitic relationship. But we know that diseases and parasites often turn to a more benign relationship over time because when the host is killed nobody really wins, and from there we see often see a change to one which is actually beneficial. Or at least there is an accommodation where they become so used to one another that we see more problems when one is removed.
And if you push this from the origin of the eukaryote back to the origin of the prokaryote then it is the change from a less defined, separated, organized system of bio-chemical cycles to one which is more so. And we see good evolutionary reasons for this change in the defense of the processes of the system from outside events which have negative impacts on it.
I can understand how people are dissatisfied with something which looks too accidental to them. But frankly when we see the same sorts of “accidents” over and over and over again in science they don’t look so accidental. It looks more like a rule and principle at work, something which God sees and says “it is good.” I object far more greatly to this idea of everything being a product of design by a God like the Deist watchmaker, where everything is a cleverly designed machine. Not only does this make God responsible for everything which goes wrong but I see no reason for consciousness (let alone responsibility) in a bunch of machines. I prefer the Biblical view of God as a shepherd who seeks the good of living creatures in a relationship with Him – teacher and parent rather than designer.
Which must be distinguished from the methodological naturalism of science.
Actual science however is a methodological approach which is self-limiting and there is nothing self-defeating about it. First it requires we test our hypotheses, which means it cannot apply to ideas which are not testable. Second it requires written procedures anyone can follow to get the same results, which means it cannot apply to things which are not repeatable.
But I suppose you can say this self-limiting feature of science becomes a self-defeating feature of philosophical naturalism… that kind of logically follows. This means there is a bit of hand-waving and selective willful blindness in the insistence of philosophical naturalism to equate the findings of science with all of reality. But this does not mean I cannot sympathize when it comes as it often does from getting tired of the excesses of religion (but clearly this is emotion not logic).
And many people worshipped the sun, or moon, or plants or animals etc… Is that the fault of the sun, moon, plants, or animals? I don’t think so!
I don’t disagree with scientific thinking. I think science does an amazing job of explaining things that 1) can be mathematically modeled and 2) explained scientifically. Efficient causes go a long way in illuminating reality. My problem is when science is turned into scientism (per the 2nd definition of MW) or a religion. I teach science, I love it. One of the best things I did on our vacation on the beach this year was breaking out my dedicated h-alpha solar telescope and observing the sun every morning it wasn’t cloudy. But my love for science also means an intense dislike for the perversion of it.
I’d say it absolutely follows because you can’t scientifically prove scientism so claiming science is the only legitimate source of knowledge saws off the branch it sits in.
I think some people get caught up too much with a small minority of Christians who are just very loud in their fundamentalism. If we leave YECs alone we would see the greatest thinkers throughout history have been theists. Schools, hospitals etc are largely indebted to the Church and the ideals of Western civilization, at least until this latest generation that believes in nothing, have rested on the teachings of Jesus.
The god of the gaps is an error when it claims that God is only in the gaps. This is seen in both atheistic “we have a physical explanation, so God wasn’t involved” and theistic “God was involved, so there can’t be a physical explanation”. God can work through ordinary means or not. It’s worth seeing if we can find a natural-law type explanation of things, but not everything will be explained that way.
Prokaryotic cells are significantly simpler than eukaryotic cells, with plenty of variation within them in degrees of complexity in various features. The fossil record is not likely to help us much, as most prokaryotes don’t have very distinctive appearances. We can look for distinctive molecular traces (e.g. “this chemical is only produced by cyanobacteria”), but those do not give a picture of how the cell evolved.
We do see hints in the modern genetic code of simpler ancestors. Genes for the tRNAs show patterns of similarity that suggest an ancestor with fewer, i.e. making use of fewer amino acids.
Protocells are likely to be outcompeted by more advanced cells. Finding surviving ones seems unlikely, although it’s also true that we have a very limited knowledge of the diversity of prokaryotes; who knows what might lurk unstudied.
Experimentally, we are gradually building up the range of chemicals that can be produced from simple non-living components under possible early earth conditions. Conversely, we are finding possible simplifications from existing organisms. There certainly remains a gap in between, but given how new the technologies are that enable us to investigate these questions, that gap is a question mark, not a demonstrated chasm.
David,
Glad you are interested In this important question of where the cell came from, and what, if it had one, it’s protocell would look like.
Interesting, but perhaps not very significant, that there are variations in the nucleotide sequences of tRNAs of prokaryotic cells.
What is significant though, is that they all have tRNAs and every other important component needed for the common, yet amazing, protein synthesis activity, that is present in all cells, whether prokaryotic or eukaryotic.
In science always,
Doug
T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
60
Are you asking why humans are curious? The question itself seems to be a paradox.
Curiosity, the pursuit of knowledge, and the thirst for exploration seem to be as much a part of the human experience as anything else.
If we are going to learn what outcomes our actions can have that means we need to learn things and pursue new knowledge.
