faustus@ucbvax.UUCP (01/05/84)
x You are missing an important point when you say that "logic makes some basic assumptions". Logic, in itself, makes no assumptions, it has axioms. The results you obtain are to be considered only in relation to your axioms, and how you apply the results and choose the axioms have nothing to do with the logical process. The same applies to sciences like physics -- you create axioms and build systems on them, but you are not making assumptions. And when you say that some physical statement is true, you are really saying that it follows from certain axioms, which are probably the correct (or the best) ones to make. No physicist, however, would say that some statement is "absolutely true", and I think the same holds true for biologists and other scientists -- they create axioms and form theories, but they never claim that something can absolutely be proven about the real world. As you point out, you can always take the position of the solipsist, but this is counter to the whole point of scientific thought, which is that the Fundamental Axiom Of Science: "Nature is regular", leads to a system that is useful. So you really can't say that the creationist viewpoint is absolutely worthless, because there is no way to make the scientific system foolproof. I don't believe, either, that any scientist who thinks about the philophical basis of his system would disagree. Although it is probably sort of useless to point this out to most people, it is important to know in the great arena of idealogical contention where the walls are, so to speak, or something like that... Wayne
laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (01/07/84)
Laura Creighton, the addled philosopher here. :-) What Steve says is very true. Moreover, I am prepared to prove it. for those of you who are reading this in net.religion, Russell Anderson has presented a lovely intorduction to the Patristic period and has begun to show how Christianity has been influenced by Greek philosophy. I am going to do one further and discuss how more modern philosophy has influenced both science and religion. What prompted me to do this was the Fundamental statements in the article "can Creationists contribute to Science". they are pretty good postulates to believe in, but you don't have to. In particular, the British Empiricists *didn't* believe in them. They got an awful lot of science done. Therefore, these postulates do not adequately describe science. Now these postulates can be traced back to Descartes. (Actually you can trace them further, but I want to start with Descartes so that is where I am going to start). Then I am going to present an Empirical viewpoint. Finally I am going to present Hegel (a rationalist) an Kierkegaard (and existentialist). Now it is quite possible to spend all of your life discussing, analysing and thinking about any of these men, so when I say "I am going to present" what I really mean is that I am going to give a capsul summary. I will tell you where i got what I am saying so that you can go look this up. The fundamental problem (the way I see it anyway) is most clearly seen in the conflict between Hegel's "Truth is the Whole" and Kierkegaard's "Truth is Subjectivity". However, most people I know don't even know who Kierkegaard and Hegel were, so I am going to have to present Descartes and Hume (he's a British Empiricist) or Berkeley (he's another British Empiricist, and he pronounces his name "Barkly" *not* like the place where 4.1 bsd comes from) so that these people can understand what these people mean. So expect one article on Descartes, one on Hume and/or Berkeley and either one on Hegel and one of Kierkegaard or, more likely, one on both. Those of you who know who these people are probably know what I am going to say as well. You can either use your 'n' key, or read them and add to them, or read them and *don't* add to them, or pick nits. I don't care. For those of you that are still interested: WHERE. I am getting out of net.physics. (Loud cheer from the people who wish I were already out -- I hear it now). I am also getting out of net.misc. Steve, you are going to have to read it in net.philosophy or net.religion if you are interested, because I am leaving it both places. Posting it to net.misc will not save me from the nit-pickers -- they follow me wherever I go. For those of you who are reading this in net.religion -- yes, I am going to post Descartes' proof for the existance of God, be patient, it has been a long week and I've been busy. Lastly, there is a subset of you who think that philosophy has nothing to do with religion and that I should get out of net.religion as well. I am attempting to post something which should change your mind about this, but I have tried changing people's minds in net.religion before and I know that it doesn't work all that well. Or at any rate, that I am not very good at it. Will those of you who morally obligated to send me mail explaining to me that philosophy has nothing to do with religion and so I should stop posting this swill to net.religion please use a descriptive Subject: line in your mail? That way I can delete all of those messages without bothering to read them. Don't expect a reply. Hmm. While I am at it, the same goes for those who want to call me a Satanist. you can do that in the Subject: line as well. Laura Creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura
stevesu@azure.UUCP (Steve Summit) (01/10/84)
When I read the "Proposal to Eliminate the Deleterious Effects of Religious Beliefs upon Science and Education," I somehow missed the title and the word "Creationists" therein, and found the article quite reasonable indeed. (I didn't scrutinize it terribly carefully, and the objections several people have raised about the incompatibility of repeatability and divine intervention are valid.) However, some of the other suggestions in the article are terribly important, and may be missed if you assume a knee-jerk attitude against "those creationists." Laura asks who except the creationists and the ecologists "finds that the philosophy of science is not neutral enough for their liking." I do. I don't have time right now to write a long essay, and I'm not at all interested in getting in a flaming, nit-picking discussion with the flaming nit-pickers out there. I'll give this a try: bear in mind that it is fairly informal and subjective. Science is a religion. It is considerably more detached and rational than conventional religions, but blind faith in the value of rationality is a religion, too. Science demands faith just as religion does. You have to have faith in the veracity of logic. You have to have faith in the mechanism of cause and effect. You have to have faith that observed regularities will repeat themselves. You have to have faith in the existence of the world around around you and your perceptions of it. In fact, the aforementioned "Proposal" is considerably less neutral and skeptical than it could be in that it assumes most of these faiths. I am uncomfortable with some of its "assumptions basic to science" (section B.2) such as "The natural world is lawful and reproducible" and "The laws of logic are valid." Please do not immediately dismiss me as an addled philosopher. Of course, we take most of these things for granted today. That is, in fact, a cultural phenomenon. In times past, the existence of God was universally taken for granted. Is there any fundamental difference? There are primitive tribes today which are utterly incapable of dealing with "obvious" concepts such as models and regularity. They refuse to identify a picture of an elephant as an elephant. If you point out that it has rained every day this week and that it is cloudy and windy today, they will not even venture a guess as to whether it will rain today. They are not stupid, or wrong. Their enculturated philosophy is just different. I am not saying that we should not take cause and effect for granted, and I am not saying that we should take God for granted. I am merely pointing out that it is just as impossible to prove conclusively the existence of either of them. You cannot prove anything without some fundamental postulates, and they are always going to be subject to doubt. You are going to have to have implicit faith in your postulates, to believe in them just as you might believe in God. Even if your proof contains no explicit postulates, it is implicitly bound by the nature of its being a proof to require the implicit acceptance of logic, and probably of cause and effect as well. I am not arguing against science. Science (and technology) have rather unquestionably done us some good. Blind faith in them, however, is just as dangerous as blind faith in God. There is no question in my mind that the current "implicitly or explicitly espoused definitions of science" have a major effect on our world view. Non-scientific societies may not believe as strongly in rationality and the unemotional application of technology as we do. Without them, they probably cannot discover concepts such as nuclear physics. They also would not consider achieving a desired result, like ending a war, with a simpleminded cause like dropping a technological fruit, the atomic bomb, on a couple of cities full of people, especially without exhausting every other alternative. (Yes, there have always been wars. I think the achievement of nuclear warfare is both quantitatively and qualitatively different. I think the current nuclear dilemma confirms this.) Science can never stand completely apart from society and its inherent foibles and irrationalities. The "Proposal" is in fact deficient in this regard as well. No matter how neutral, how detached scientific investigation is, the very subjects it chooses to investigate are influenced by, and have an impact upon, the culture in which the investigation is carried out. I am personally offended that anyone could even conceive of the concept of a computer achieving human-like intelligence, let alone going out and trying to implement it. Life cannot be reduced to an equation, to be manipulated with cool, detached rationality. The only thing you can truly do with it is appreciate it, and any attempts to analyze or explain it must always be taken with a grain of salt. After all, you really can't prove that God didn't create the heaven and the earth (he could have faked the contradicting evidence) and you can't even prove you're not dreaming. What am I trying to get at here? I should point out that I do not wholly believe in either the conventional explanations of creation or evolution. The book of Genesis is a bit too simpleminded and magical, but the Origin of the Species is too detached and scientific to account for the beauty and splendor of the world we live in. I'm going to try to wind this down into some sort of conclusion. At the risk of sounding like the Californian I am, be mellow. Don't take anything too seriously. Science and technology can help you out, and so can religion. There's some stuff in the Bible about loving your fellow man that we could use more of today. Neither science nor religion will help you much if you're marooned on a desert island in search of food, or marooned in a sea of people in search of love. You need some practical, personal (intuitive, emotional) skills as well. I'm sorry for the rambling style of this article. I could (and should) write an essay about each of these paragraphs, but this is too long for net.misc already. I've thrown in a lot of my half-baked ideas without adequate explanation. I'd be interested in carrying on this discussion, particularly in a calm and friendly manner. (Unfortunately, I don't subscribe to net.religion or net.philosophy because, last time I looked, they were bogged down in nit-picking and definitions and looked positively rabid.) What happened to the net.origins that got proposed in net.physics a while back? It looked like it could be interesting. Good night, Steve Summit tektronix!tekmdp!stevesu