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!stevesubch@unc.UUCP (Byron Howes ) (02/06/84)
>>I do not think that Larry Bickford's discription of "compact intervention" >>to be "impossible to work with". I don't think it would invalidate much >>of the scientific knowledege we have about the way things work today. Nor >>do I think that scientific inquiry into the past would be rendered useless. >>Sure, a creator could have fooled us into thinking that we actually have a >>past, but why is it necessary to make that assumption? Unless you are willing to lay down a set of rules for Deific intervention, that is make the Deity a non-random theoretical factor, the notion of intervention "compact" or otherwise, effectively trashes science as it has been conducted in the past and as it is conducted today. If we assert that "a miracle" has been the cause of some event, then we must allow for "miracles" involved in, or at the heart of other events, or all events. If, in fact, we have a capricious Deity running around changing things as we look at them then the verifiable experiment of today may be unreproducable tomorrow. Is this any way to run a universe? >>The problem I think that most people would have with this "compact >>intervention" idea is that it allows that there might be some things >>that are beyond our ability to know or discover. But is this a good argument >>against it? Why should accepting the possibility that we may not be able >>to know something hinder us from trying? Most scientists accept the notion that there are things that they may not be able to know *in their lifetime* so in a sense it is not too difficult to make the step that there may be things that will never be known. However, how can we tell the difference between a research path which will bear fruitful scientific results and one which will dead-end at a miracle. How do we know a miracle when we come to it? Actually, Paul, you make a good case for adhering to evolutionist theory here. Even if I assume that the creationist argument is correct, I must continue to pursue the evolutionist argument so as not to allow the possibility of a miracle to hinder my research. >>Suppose, for the sake of argument, that this compact intervention idea is >>actually correct. Should we then still prefer our naturalistic explainations >>because those are the ones we can grasp? Isn't this like prefering to look >>in the kitchen for the nickel we lost in the basement because there's light >>in the kitchen? Indeed we should. Your analogy is a little off base since (a) we don't know we lost the nickle in the basement and (b) we're not sure its a nickle we're looking for or a dime, or possibly a tube of toothpaste. It makes sense to begin in the kitchen and work our way down to the basement after we've checked the kitchen out. Then, again, maybe its an elephant in the living room we're looking for. You get the idea. -- Byron Howes UNC - Chapel Hill (decvax!mcnc!unc!bch)
unbent@ecsvax.UUCP (02/06/84)
<> May I recommend ABUSING SCIENCE: The Case Against Creationism Philip Kitcher MIT Press; 1982. Kitcher is a philosopher of science at the University of Minnesota who knows his science (evolutionary theory), knows his "scientific creationism", and writes clear prose accessible to a lay public explaining the former and *demolishing* the latter. Sometimes we philosophers *can* perform a public service. If only anyone would *listen*.... --Jay Rosenberg Department of Philosophy Univ. of North Carolina @ Chapel Hill (ecsvax!unbent)
ken@ihuxq.UUCP (ken perlow) (02/08/84)
--
I'll keep it short. Creationists seem to think that "scientific
debate" is like political debate: you get some speakers from both
sides to argue in front of an audience. No serious scientist, of
course, tries to advance his or her cause that way. After all,
even our legal system has given up on trial by combat. So, as I
see it, the most damning evidence against the creationist lobby
came out during the Arkansas trial on Public Law 590, which mandated
that creation and evolution both be taught, and which was struck
down. A witness for the state was asked if he knew of any ATTEMPT
by creationists to have their theories or data published in ANY
scientific journal. He said, "No."
I, for one, am not about to argue with these creationist snake-oil
salesmen nor their apologists on the net. Let them publish their
stuff in scientific journals, where it can be studied by the
scientific community, or else prove that they've been refused the
forum.
--
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