I thought you all might be interested in a book we just released this week – Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Methodologies. It has been heading up the Amazon charts, and hit the #1 Hot New Release spot today on three lists – Scientific Research, Epistemology, and Psychology.
This book is based on the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism conference earlier this year. Anyway, I hope some of you check it out and see what you think!
Light a match, of course.
Cough your head off, and go back to bed. That’s what I’m doing, anyway. If Bartlett responds to me, you’re my designated proxy.
Interestingly, the reason I got started in using the algorithmic distinction is because it is the one place where I could get any agreement between naturalists and non-naturalists about what is meant. While not every naturalist believes in computationalism, I couldn’t find any other definition of naturalism that either (a) had any interesting entailments, or (b) had anything to do with what any non-naturalist believes. As an example, Hans Halvorson is a vehement defender of methodological naturalism, but he includes angels and demons as being part of what it means to be methodologically naturalistic. Other have said things like “anything observable”, but, since they also include indirect observations, there is nothing that distinguishes that from anything non-naturalistic. The whole point of being a non-naturalist is believing in entities that are non-naturalistic that produce effects. If they didn’t produce effects, there wouldn’t be any point in arguing about them.
Therefore, that leaves as the one meaning of “methodological naturalism” that isn’t ridiculous on its face as being something like computationalism. If you have a better idea for a distinction, I’d love to hear it. I’d also love to hear what your problems with using computationalism as a distinction are. But the entire point of using it is that it actually makes sense of the conversation, and many naturalists (such as Stephen Wolfram) employ it.
Backup proxy.
Doesn’t give you the right to resolve the issue ever-so-conveniently for yourself. This is the only sentence I’ve read.
Take it away, Glen and Patrick.
Well Duh. Accuse them of child abuse or sanctioning child abuse.
Ah, the Mises Institute. That’s one of Patrick’s Libertarian gangs!
Love the bedfellows thing. All Trumpians anyhow.
My guess not long until the libertarians learn that Trump is bad for business
Call me puzzled.
Why would you have a conference and a book on naturalism, if you are having difficulty understanding what it means?
This makes no sense to me.
Personally, I am not a proponent of naturalism, precisely because I cannot work out what “naturalism” actually means. I don’t think it means anything at all.
It wouldn’t look as good to simply oppose science.
So they fearlessly take on the simple little device invented to let theocrats keep their beliefs without pointing out the obvious, that they lack any meaningful evidence.
Glen Davidson
Glen’s continual projection is duly noted. Can anyone say what the meaningful evidence that supports evolution by means of blind and mindless processes?
Anyone?
The conference would be to hammer out what it means by having different viewpoints in the discussion. The book would be what came from that conference so people can see and judge for themselves.
🙂
def. natural – not supernatural
def. supernatural – not natural
…or how to keep an IDiot busy
So it is all circular reasoning.
Is the idea to make the circle big enough that nobody notices?
JohnnyB – the blurb says: “Finally, the third part looks at how non-naturalistic methodologies can be beneficially incorporated into specific fields, and how in a few cases non-naturalistic methodologies have already been into certain fields.”
What’s the one best example that is “successfully incorporated”?
Cold.
I’ve advocated that naturalism should not be conflated with science. Science should be metaphysically neutral. An example of why is Haeckel:
Why does naturalism have to enter a scientific question at all? The lack spontaneous generation was refuted scientifically, not with appeals to naturalistic philosophy. The spontaneous generation of the present is now replaced with the supposed abiogenesis of the past, and IDists are more confident than ever abiogenesis is just as much a dead end as spontaneous generation.
Dan Graur and Larry Moran’s opposition to the possibility of junkDNA not being junk is rooted in naturalism. Dan Graur said it best, “If ENCODE is true, evolution is wrong.” Why does this junk (pun intended) have to pollute scientific investigation?
Why does someone like Mark Armitage have to be fired because he is a YEC and found scientific evidence that supports his beliefs. Armitage won his lawsuit, btw. Below is one of the electron microscopy photographs showing well-preserved dinosaur tissue that got him fired. Why are C14 and other clocking data indicating the fossil record could be young suppressed, when it is quietly acknowledge by Accelerator Mass Spectrometry specialists?
Why was the Big Bang and evidence of Fine Tuning and the Earth being a privileged planet (which suggest miraculous agencies) opposed? When it got so obvious the universe had a beginning and that there is fine tuning, the mainstream finally caved — a little bit.
If the fossil record is young, this may have implications for understanding geology and earthquakes and climate change. Naturalism is poisoning open and free inquiry.
I probably couldn’t make my case for some of the fossil record stuff in JohnnyB’s and Eric’s book, but it was pretty easy to go after Dan Graur and the evolutionary biologists who support Graur’s position. The naturalism they advocate in the guise of the “science” of evolutionary theory is unhelpful if not damaging to the progress of medical research.
I argued in JohnnyB’s book, the medical establishment on the whole has decided not wager with Dan Graur anyway. Billions of dollars over the next decade will be committed by the government and private industry to study the very thing he says doesn’t exist, namely large scale functionality in the genome.
If the evolutionary biologists just want to close their eyes and plug their ears to function in the genome, let them, but they should butt out of telling molecular biologists what they can and cannot discover and keep their naturalism to themselves.
No, he didn’t. The university settled with him out of court.
def: ooga: not booga
def: booga: not ooga.
See how that didn’t actually define anything? You just wrote out a textbook tautology.
It isn’t. That’s how creation science hit the bucket. It made positive claims, falsifiable claims like “the world was created 6000 years ago in 6 days”
Failed to pass scientific scrutiny, and now all you guys have are negative arguments against an imaginary enemy you call “naturalism”
You guys are nothing more than a bunch of charlatans
Don’t forget to add child abusers and sanctioners of child abuse!
But if anything has an outstanding history of success in the field of medicine, it’s treatment based on supernatural beliefs. The only effective way to kill the intelligently designed MRSA is prayer and holy water.
I wasn’t using the legal definition of win, I was referring to how even atheists like Mehta characterized the EFFECT of the lawsuit, winning a settlement, and I count that as win.
But if you don’t want to count that as a win, Ok, I respect that, Mark got a six-figure non-win settlment. 🙂
Ok, if in your book, he didn’t win, then he put the university in a position it had to pay him.
Sal,
Whatever happened to the tropical vegetation found in a frozen mammoth’s stomach? You seem to have given up on that line.
Not to worry. Sal has a virtually bottomless sack of YEC lies to pick from. Whenever one gets exposes he just moves to the next without missing a beat.
what do the adherents of “naturalism” think of this definition?
I know that I like it. 😉
peace
johnnyb said:
It’s easier to protect against what one sees as a threatening viewpoint is if one doesn’t have to actually specify their own views. Specifying one’s own views opens you up to meaningful criticism. Typically, if an argument they feel threatened by begins with the premise X (about their views), then regardless of how trivial and accepted X is as an appropriate premise, the easiest way to deflect the argument is to just disagree with the validity of that premise. That way they don’t even have to listen to the argument; in their mind, it’s already invalid.
As you so appropriately ask, if naturalism’s core is not computationalism, then how is it meaningful to use the term “naturalism”? IMO, “naturalism”, like “materialism” or “physicalism”, are used as a deceit to hide the real perspective in play: “anti-Theism/Religion/Spirituality/Supernaturalism”. Naturalism is just a term they use as a bulwark against what they feel are theistic incursions.
IMO, the people you argue against (well, they’re not really “arguing”, they’re just complaining) don’t really themselves have a meaningful, defensible philosophical definition of naturalism because it doesn’t really mean anything to them other than “no god-like stuff allowed”.
William J. Murray,
No god-like stuff apparent, is how I would put it. This I do not see as ‘deceit’ – though I would say that, I guess, in a lame last-ditch attempt to cover up the deceit.
William J. Murray,
Is it ID’s task to match our “pathetic level of detail”?
Please, tell us how the Designer really does things.
As for “naturalism,” it is conveniently vague for the conspiratorially-minded. But it’s not really anything in science, having no bearing on the scientific method, which readily tests spooky phenomena if it actually has entailments. ESP, psychokinesis, and the like, aren’t disparaged because science won’t touch them, but because science has found them wanting.
Glen Davidson
I define naturalism as the metaphysical position that all epistemic access to causally efficacious entities involves either direct perception of spatio-temporal location or indirect measurements of theoretical posits involving spatio-temporal location.
The argument here turns on the claim that any putative or supposed cognitive power attributed to the human mind must in turn be subject to public norms of verification if we are to avoid fantasizing, delusion, or even simple error.
From the requirement that any putative cognitive power must itself be subjected to public norms of verification, it follows that we do not have any cognitive power to attribute causal powers to entities that do not occupy a spatio-temporal location.
And that in turn grounds metaphysical naturalism.
So you meant an “alternative win”. Got it.
Lawsuits are typically settled for financial reasons, not principles. The university no doubt knew that it would cost more in lawyers fees to defend their case, there was no chance of collecting those fees from Armitage after winning, and there is always the risk of getting a creationist on the jury.
I agree with the last sentence of this paragraph.
However, your attempted distinction between naturalism and non-naturalism is confused at best. If an entity produces effects that are detectable then those effects can be studied scientifically. Such effects are part of the natural world by virtue of being detectable.
I haven’t read your book and, with all due respect, I’m not going to give money to a creationist. From what little you’ve written about it here, it seems that you’re assuming your conclusion: “Naturalism is anything computable. Human brains are capable of non-computable operations. Therefore human brains are supernatural.” Have I summarized your syllogism correctly? If so, can you see the problems with it?
If I haven’t summarized your argument accurately, please correct me.
I’m not an adherent of naturalism.
In any case, I think computationalism is absurd.
I suggest that you ask creationists, ID proponents and other selected theists. They seem to be the main users of “naturalism”, typically as a term of disparagement.
WJM,
I declare that from now on god-like stuff will be allowed.
What god-like-stuff do you have to show?
Because universes just cause themselves to pop into existence. And then lifeless universes just happen to produce life. And then life just happens to produce belief in God. What’s left for a God to do?
I advocate, no naturalism of the gaps stuff allowed either. Science should be metaphysically neutral, and even Dawkins has this to say:
So how can science infer a creative deity? If the deity left a gap that only God can fill, like the existence of life and large scale functioning in the DNA that shows
“ENCODE is right, therefore evolution is wrong.”
But until that day, letting science be metaphysically neutral on matters of origins seems a legitimate policy. I’ve argued that we have credible evidence naturalism is at the least unhelpful if not now damaging to a few select scientific questions.
Also, why create financial trouble for the science industry? Dispensing with Caroline Crocker and Richard Sternberg’s career, losing money over firing YECs like Mark Armtage, making trouble for Robert Marks (Baylor should be so grateful to have him)… this generates a lot of unnecessary bad will for science.
That’s just your unsupported opinion. Life has not been demonstrated to require a deity has it?
Best example of question begging the question coupled with an argument from ignorance one can provide. No actual apparent anything, just your assumption of what you think is the default to what you don’t know.
And creationists wonder why the scientific community is apriori skeptical of all creationists concepts and proposals…
This!
“I can’t imagine something so complex as life coming about without something beyond natural power and natural limitations” is simply not a valid argument or approach to understanding anything.
LoL! @ Robin- Mung was joking. But as for the alleged scientific community if they aren’t skeptical about evolutionism then why should anyone listen to them?
Robin- you have no way to test the claims of your position
Picking the winners of sports , the lottery and elections.
What would “naturalism of the gaps” even look like without resorting to fallacious reasoning?
Don’t look for actual causes.
That never ends well for creationists/IDists.
Glen Davidson
And appear on toast!
Crocker taught ID instead of science so her contract wasn’t renewed. Sternberg bypassed peer review and negatively affected the journal he was responsible for, and still didn’t get fired. Baylor declined to allow Marks to suggest that the university supported his ID work, but Marks is still employed there. Armitage got lucky in the lawsuit lottery.
The bad will is earned by the creationists, and it’s well deserved.
Not needed. Robin can imagine things, fantastical things, magical things, and that’s all that is required.
Yawn…c’mon Mung. Joe’s just an uneducated troll, but I thought you at least were creative. This from you is about as absurd as one can be.
So this isn’t a test:
http://tiktaalik.uchicago.edu/searching4Tik.html
If not, why not?
And this:
http://www.ecology.com/2010/06/07/evolution-of-whales/
If not, why not?
and this:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/04/060422121625.htm
If not, why not?
So really…which hasn’t been tested: evolutionary theory or “I can’t imagine something so complex as life coming about without something beyond natural power and natural limitations”? What kind of testing you got there for this supposed “ID” of yours? Which one relies on “imagine things, fantastical things, magical things, and that’s all that is required”…?