Hash Out A New View of Methodological Naturalism?

I actually think Joshua would agree that is a reasonable limitation - once one realises science is not “The Truth” but a specific way of answering a specific set of questions nature raises, most of the problems go away.

As for psychiatry and economics, what are they but ways of organising soft subjects into some kind of regularity. Bob thinks he’s the Emperor of China, and Sheila hears voices - psychiatry is able to discern the patterns that make “paranoid schizophrenia” a useful label for helping them.

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Thanks, Daniel - that is entirely my point.

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Wouldn’t this be true only if the part that science cannot study studies does not effect the part that science studies… if there is a lot of interference, then scientific explanations of phenomenon would be blurred versions of what is actually going on… And the accuracy of predictions in many cases would be more due to coincidences/correction factors added to give correct results even though the explanation is not “True”?

I think this is why many scientists who are theists seem to prefer a worldview that leans towards deism.

I’m sure you’re right there.

If we didn’t revere science so much, it would be easy to live with the limitations the unpredictable puts upon it… and in this discussion, of course, that includes what God may do.

In medicine we have to live with that fuzziness all the time, because we can’t deny that our results are affected by people, who are not only all different, but who forget to take the treatment we’re evaluating (and lie about it), and so on.

But as I’ve argued repeatedly on these threads, science at all levels already has that category of fuzziness, and it’s called “randomness.” Whether that arises from the inability to control experimental conditions, human error, unobservable events approximated to statistical patterns, or divine action, it still limits the exactness of even the exact sciences.

The universe is set up so that we can know some stuff, but not most - and that ought to be OK.

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End of the day… all of this seems to be influenced by a Postmodern world view…
the west seems to have moved on from X-Files view of “The truth is out there” to “The Truth (with a capital T) cannot be known with certainty”… leaving a lot of room for personal interpretation…

For some reason i am not surprised. As far as i can see in history, science has always followed whichever philosophy gains ascendance in community.

Ironic if true, science being the one academic bastion holding out against postmodern slush!

But I think it’s half true, in the sense that postmodernism was, at the start, a legitimate protest against Rationalist claims such as that human reason can answer all possible questions with certainty, that science is the True tool of reason, and that Us Enlightened Folks are the people to put it all together.

After that postmodernism goes into La-La land.

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Many a true word is spoken in jest. Not that I think angels are material, but (a) if they were, exclusing them by some “supernatural” category would illegitimately prevent their study and (b) since they disappear in flames, go through walls, etc, we need to refine our definition of “material”.

I suggest you leave this bit out, because it’s highly culturally based, as Neil points out above: Newton’s gravity, in the PoS of the time, was occult and magical because action at a distance did not conform to “the mechanical philosophy.”

Now, at that time “magic” was regarded strictly as a natural matter, which is why Newton did far more work on alchemy than he ever did on astronomy.

Likewise, in antiquity Babylonian science was about the empirical study of repeatable, regular events whose causes were assumed to be the “verdict of the gods.”

So within this discussion of MN, where people are suggesting angels or gods might be studied because their actions produced repeatable effects like Newton’s gravity did (with whom I agree), would it be legitimate for some historically-inclined scientist to re-run the Babylonian studies of omens to measure any correlations with human affairs, or would some criterion exclude it?

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A significant part of science is engaged in coming up with new and better ways of quantifying aspects of nature.

Whether those count as sciences, I will leave for others to argue. However, there is certainly quantification.

Economics deals with money, which is already a quantity. Psychology and psychiatry do develop various measuring scales, used for quantifying.

Why is it wrong for a scientist to assume that creation is independent of divine influence?

True… but there is no guarantee that everything
can be quantified… so I think it would be reasonable to acknowledge that science deals with specific aspects (which are quantifiable) of a subset of nature. This is the current reality and there is no way to establish that it’s possible to quantify all aspects of reality without getting into metaphysics, philosophy and even theology.

I agree with you here. Though the variable which cannot be measured in these fields is human consciousness/choice. So it’s definitely an interesting question.

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Because that is a metaphysical or theological conclusion, not a scientific one.

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oh, in that case, I, as an atheist scientist, declare that it is hereby proper and right for a scientist to assume that creation is independent of divine influence. (Patrick 11/12/2018)

Agree - and mainly because choice is contingent. Of course, one can group choices and apply statistics: “8 out of 10 people voted for Smith, saying Jones was an idiot.” Theoretically one might even pin down the regular neurological components of choice. But consciousness and choices in themselves are not part of science.

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Oh - I missed one out. Should have said: “Because that is a metaphysical or theological or polemic conclusion, not a scientific one.” My bad.

Of course, scientists are personally free to make their own theological or metaphysical conclusions on whatever basis. What I’m saying is that saying that creation is independent of divine influence implies you know what divine influence is and what form it takes. That requires more than just scientific reasoning. The proper scientific attitude would be agnosticism.

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ok since you added polemic to your list, I take back my decree. It is okay for scientist to assume anything they’d like regarding creation.

Agreed.

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21 posts were split to a new topic: Creation Without A Creator?

Amen!