In a post entitled “Why science cannot be the only way of knowing: A reply to Jason Rosenhouse” at Uncommon Descent web site, Vincent Torley writes:
The following is a short (but not exhaustive) list of background assumptions about the world, which the scientific method presupposes. Science would be impossible as an enterprise, if the vast majority of scientists did not hold these assumptions:
(a) There exists an external world, which is independent of our human minds: it’s real, regardless of whether we believe in it or not;
(b) Objects in the external world have certain identifying characteristics called dispositions, which scientists are able to investigate;
(c) Objects in the external world behave in accordance with certain mathematical regularities, which we call the laws of Nature, and which tell us how those objects ought to behave;
(d) Scientific induction is reliable: scientists can safely assume that the laws of Nature hold true at all times and places;
(e) Solipsism is false: there exist other embodied agents, with minds of their own;
(f) Communication is possible: scientists are capable of talking to one another, and sharing their observations, as well as their thoughts (or interpretations) relating to those observations;
(g) The senses are reliable, under normal conditions, within their proper domain, which means that scientists are capable of making measurements on an everyday basis;
(h) There exist standard conditions, under which ordinary people (including scientists) are routinely capable of thinking logically, making rational discourse possible;
(i) Scientists are morally responsible for their own actions – in particular, they are responsible for their decision to tell the truth about what they have observed, or to lie about it; and
(j) Scientists should not lie under any circumstances, when doing science.
Science would also collapse as an enterprise, if these background assumptions were not objectively true.
So, I wonder if Vincent’s list of assumptions that must be true is a fair summary of how scientific endeavour proceeds. I can’t see anything to dispute regarding a): Dr. Johnson’s test works well enough for me.
Point b). Don’t like the look of that word “disposition”! Why can’t we stick with characteristics, properties or observable phenomena? If “disposition” is synonymous, then, OK.
Point c) Disagree. We observe phenomena and attempt to model them mathematically. Good models are descriptive and reliably predict outcomes that fit the data. Particles and waves don’t carry rule books.
Point d) Why “safely”? Induction is a useful process in mathematics and mathematics produce good models for science. Whilst past performance does not guarantee future success, we can make provisional working assumptions until they, well, cease to work.
Point e) Back to Dr Johnson!
Point f) Communication is key to human success as a social species.
Point g) Human senses can be easily fooled. Eye-witness evidence and memory are notoriously unreliable. Nullius in verba. This is why peer review and repeatability are important aspects of scientific endeavour.
Point h) Don’t see the relevance.
Point i) Individual scientists can be mistaken, selectively ignore data that are problematic for their hypothesis, and have been known to falsify data. Repeatability is an effective counter to false claims.
Point j) Humans lie. Scientists are human. Again repeatability is there as a safeguard.
The claim that science would collapse if any of Torley’s points did not hold is not correct.
ETA grammar, ETA 2 spelling
I just posted about that Torley post on my blog:
On vjtorley on ways of knowing.
No, I don’t agree with his list of assumptions.
Goodness me Neil. I was unaware that you had already posted your piece when I wrote mine. Almost makes you think there must be other ways of knowing when noting the similarity in your and my responses!
That’s called a discovery.
How many psychology studies would that make impossible?
Reliable, in that we have to use them to interact with the world. Isn’t a whole lot of science about learning when and how to rely upon the senses? Is your sense of up and down really reliable when flying in the clouds, or should you refer to your instruments (ah, but you’re still using your senses there–well, yeah, the point is not that we can be rid of our senses, rather, how to actually use them reliably)? Maybe all of that is covered in the nebulous qualifiers, but how is anyone to know?
The whole list looks suspiciously like one predicated upon naive realism being the basis of science. It’s not, there need be no “external world” at all, just phenomena that can be discussed intersubjectively with “others,” whether these “others” are “real subjects” or merely a weird part of my solipsistic existence (if I were to go that way).
Most of the list works reasonably well for science if properly qualified or rewritten (senses being reliable under “normal conditions,” etc., is hopelessly inadequate, yet ultimate reliance upon the senses appears inevitable for science), but some are discoveries rather than assumptions, and others fit well with a realism, naive or otherwise, which is compatible with, but certainly not necessary for, science.
Glen Davidson
Creationists have a habit of winning by defining themselves as the winner.
Without trying to hijack the thread, I will concur that particles and waves do not carry rule books. They do not obey laws or regularities.
We infer regularities, which are useful until we reach conditions (usually extreme) under which the equations no longer fit the data.
I also concur that the behavior of individual scientists is irrelevant. Individuals can be incompetent, deceitful, or just mistaken. More importantly, science requires imagination, and imagination can fail. On can fail to make an inference that later seems obvious.
But ID also makes inferences. What distinguishes sciences is iteration. Imagine. test, refine, repeat..
This strikes me as the essential difference between the creationist “methodology”, such as it is, and the scientific method. Creationists (including the intelligent design variety) crave certainty. They are uncomfortable, at a very deep level, with provisional claims, working assumptions, accepting that some things are currently unknown, and, most of all, changing their minds when faced with new evidence.
They imagine that everyone, including working scientists, feel the same way. This leads to ridiculous claims like Torley’s about what scientists “must” assume.
Near the beginning of Torley’s piece:
At the conclusion:
As some say, intent isn’t magic, and, um, it didn’t really work out as “intended.”
Clearly it’s believing in an Exalted View (sans meaningful evidence, sadly), or that we came “from slime” (yeah, that’s the fair, objective, non-pejorative restatement of the evolutionary thesis) and that we must have “Gospel fervor” for, you know, hypotheses, theories, things that are said not to be absolute Gospel truth but to have some great evidence in some cases.
I think the upshot is that you have to learn to be fair, not merely intend to be. If you don’t know how to be (and I think the evidence points to that in Torley’s case), intending to be counts for nothing.
Glen Davidson
When he says he intends to be fair, does that mean he will open up the discussion to dissenting posters.
The way he opened up his challenge thread to me?
So your offer to take up the pseudonymous UD commenter “Kairosfocus” challenge came to nothing? I suspect Barry Arrington retains sole control over user permissions so I doubt either Vincent or GEM could have reactivated your account without Barry’s say so.
Why not publish it as a post on TSZ?
ETA I guess you already did, in essence! 😉
So, you personally don’t believe there are “non-scientific ways of knowing,” Alan?! Iow, there is no other knowledge than ‘scientific knowledge’?
One could easily respond to VJ Torley: “Don’t trust PhDs who have never published a single paper and who hawk their perspectives on a blog dedicated to IDism, yet who tactically disagree with the IDM’s leaders at Discovery Institute by intentionally capitalise ‘Intelligent’ + ‘Design’ because religion is quite obviously involved.”
Rosenhouse is philosophically challenged, as Torley (and Nick Matzke) knows. But Torley is likewise not up to speed, as he still speaks of the outdated monolithic myth of a single entity called “THE scientific method.” Often it is impoverished history and philosophy of science that obscures the conversation, both with evangelical IDists and their preferred new atheist or agnostic dancing partners.
Torley’s most basic error here is his commitment to the following suppressed premise:
Torley is committed to this premise, since nothing else he says makes sense without it. But he is not entitled to this premise, because he does not defend it in light of the anti-foundationalist challenge. Indeed, Torley has so little acquaintance with anti-foundationalist epistemology (even though it’s been around for about 200 years) that it never occurs to him that his suppressed premise might be not only made explicit, but require justification of its own.
Yet it is only if that suppressed premise is itself justified, would Torley be entitled to infer, from the bare distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge, everything else he says. Since the argument goes awry at the very beginning, a point-by-point refutation is unnecessary (though it might be intellectually gratifying nevertheless).
Speaking of Kantian Naturalists…
Glen Davidson
I prefer to say I don’t trust claims that there are other, non-scientific, ways of knowing. I also take a very broad view of what scientific endeavour is and can be.
Yes I read Matzke’s and Rosenau’s comments on Rosenhouse’s blog. It’s always difficult and usually impossible to resolve motive and mind-set for historical events such as the Galileo and Bruno affairs.
KN, I’m not sure if you are quoting Torley from elsewhere as I can’t find it in his post.
I was, at one time, quite attracted to Carnap’s view, that science deals with truth and art deals with expressions of the feeling of life. (So much the worse for metaphysics, then!) It would take only a slightly Nietzschean twist on Carnap — who was quite sympathetic to Nietzsche! — to say that expressions of the feeling of life and statements of truth are of equal value or significance for human existence.
I think that my view these days is closer to the old neo-Kantian distinction between “explanation” and “understanding” — but since there are compelling semantic reasons for thinking that there is a hermeneutic component even to causal explanations (because the application of generals to particulars is interpretative in all non-formal or substantive domains), the distinction between explanation and understanding cannot be drawn quite as the neo-Kantians did. Nevertheless, there is a distinction to be drawn here that is concealed by lumping it all together as “knowledge”.
In any comprehensive philosophy — whether naturalistic, theistic, or otherwise — epistemology and metaphysics must answer to each other. And yet, epistemology as inquiry into concepts and metaphysics as inquiry into objects must be distinguished. Simply assimilating concepts to objects effaces the normative character of concepts and leaves us with conception of the world in which rational agency is unintelligible. (This is the philosophical insight at the core of the anti-materialism that animates and sustains the entire tradition that begins with Plato’s criticism of the Presocratics.) Conversely, assimilating objects to concepts effaces the materiality of things and leaves us with a conception of the world in which resistance, error, and failure are unintelligible. We need the distinction between concepts and objects in order to avoid both ‘vulgar’ materialism and ‘vulgar’ (‘subjective’) idealism. And since we’re committed to the concept/object distinction, the inquiry into concepts (epistemology) and into objects (metaphysics) are likewise distinct yet entangled enterprises.
Indeed, making this distinction is precisely what we need to understand the power of scientific explanations — that we need reliable ways of assessing whether objects are adequately described by the concepts we have of them. The ancients and medievals failed to make this distinction. Descartes inaugurated modern philosophy precisely by recognizing that epistemology is distinct from metaphysics, but wrongly concluded that epistemology is foundational. It fell eventually to Peirce (or Hegel, depending on how one is telling the story) that epistemology and metaphysics are both distinct and mutually dependent. Among analytic philosophers, Sellars is one of the few — perhaps the only — who has properly understood this.
It is a different, though of course related, point that our metaphysics should be answerable to our best empirical inquiry — that our knowledge of reality is “consequent” to inquiry rather than “antecedent” to it, as Dewey nicely put it. And this applies as well to the metaphysics of knowledge, which ought to be informed by cognitive science.
However, there is an a priori component or moment to all cognitive awareness, whether of objects or of concepts. While this “pragmatic a priori” is not insulated from inquiry, there is an epistemological distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori that I’m committed to, as well as to a semantic distinction between the analytic and the synthetic.
One might think that pragmatists should reject the analytic/synthetic distinction. But I think that is a superficial view. For one thing, it misunderstands Quine’s achievement. All that Quine ever succeeded is showing is that one cannot maintain the analytic/synthetic distinction if one accepts an extensionalist semantics.
But extensionalist semantic should be rejected by pragmatists, for the following reason: what grounds Quinean extensionalism is a fatal misapplication of “no entity without identity”, the thought here being that we don’t even know what our ontological commitments are until we’ve regimented our language. This amounts to insisting that substantive, non-formal domains of discourse should be held to the same standard as logical or formal domains, and that doing ontology amounts to nothing more or less than imposing formalist standards of precision on substantive discourse. It is, at the deepest level, a Platonizing assumption about the methodology of ontology, despite the physicalism that Quine attempts to justify on that basis.
The converse view, that I think pragmatists ought to adopt, is allow for intensional discourse in order to do epistemology — in order to account for what it is to understand anything — and have the ontology driven by whatever empirical inquiry discloses. The ontology should be driven by science, not by logic. It’s a subtle difference between how Quine and Sellars responded to Carnap and C. I. Lewis, but it makes all the difference on the entire range of philosophical and metaphilosophical issues.
The problem with a purely a priori metaphysics is that it’s too loosely constrained. For a priori considerations only tell you how consistent one’s view is. But, to repeat a point I’ve made elsewhere on TSZ, any view can be made consistent if enough intellectual labor goes into it. A priori, or logical, considerations are governed only by intersubjective norms of inferential rigor (I would argue), so a metaphysical view governed only by a priori considerations is answerable only to intersubjective agreement. Only a metaphysics that takes science seriously is answerable to the world, because science allows the world to get a vote in what we say about it. It’s the only reliable method (or set of methods) we have for reliably distinguishing between what we believe or want to be true and what really is true.
The key idea here is that we can gauge how close our current world-picture is to the ideal description by measuring, as Jay Rosenberg puts it, “the absolute numerical magnitude of the correction factors which must be introduced into applications of the strict counterparts of predecessor laws to arrive at the values determined by their successors”. From this view, it follows that quantificational science can be known to consist in asymptotic approximations to the absolute in a way that other forms of inquiry cannot.
More philosophy talk I am afraid: suppressed premises are not explicit.
What I found puzzling is that he starts by listing scientific principles which imply the need for peer review and criticism for something to be called science.
Then he appears to want to justify claims about resurrection or design arguments for creation by appealing to techniques used in science: probability arguments or inference to the best explanation. But if he wants to claim these arguments as scientific evidence, where have either they been reviewed and accepted by the relevant scientific community?
No, I wasn’t quoting from Torley at all — it’s a premise that I found it necessary to supply. My point is that he’s committed to that premise, and that his entire view only makes sense if he were to accept that premise, but that he’s not entitled to that premise.
Put slightly otherwise, Torley’s view — that a posteriori knowledge presupposes a “foundation” of a priori knowledge — simply ignores the best insights and arguments of anti-foundationalism and pragmatism (Hegel, Peirce, Dewey, C. I. Lewis, Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, Rorty, Putnam, Brandom, and Haack).
The central idea of pragmatist epistemology, as I see it, is that the very distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori does not, by itself, entail that the former is a “foundation” for the latter. We can accept this distinction without committing ourselves to the further thought that empirical inquiry rests on a foundation of pure a priori knowledge.
Instead we can see how a priori pragmatic presuppositions are both conditions of empirical inquiry and can be rationally revised in light of empirical inquiry. It’s that second phase or moment, where the a priori is revised in light of the a posteriori, that prevents the former from being a “foundation” for the latter.
Isn’t peer review etc just a formalization of the need for third party scrutiny / variability?
Kantian Naturalist,
You dropped something there, KN. = )
That’s an NIT team at best (through a USAmerican back-door vote rigging process). Didn’t qualify for the NCAA tournament (even if you think Sellars should [in your naturalist, empiricist, pragmatist, quasi-pantheist, etc. eclecticism view] go No. 1 in the draft). But the scouts and coaching staff still don’t understand why not. Hesitation, disenchantment, quasi-nihilism; thy name is ‘just call me a Kantian!’ in the 21st century.
That’s a amazingly weak, diversionary answer. VJ Torley is obviously much braver than Alan Fox (though, as above, I disagree with Torley’s IDist ideology).
Iow, you do think there is other ‘knowledge’ than ‘scientific knowledge’ or you do not? It seems you don’t want to blatantly reveal yourself as being ‘scientistic,’ but that’s what’s in the balance. So you simply demur?
Relativising the discussion and claiming a “very broad view of” ‘science’ is just squirrely-swirly-skeptic nonsense (oh, that’s Neil?), which most people needn’t take seriously.
Gregory
Sorry, Gregory, it was a bit of a poor answer but I did borrow it (the framing at least) from Vincent.
I’m convinced that the only way we can know anything of the external world is via our sensory inputs. Everything has to come that way. I think the edges of philosophy and science are more blurred than I used to. I am prepared to be surprised by knowledge of the external world that might arrive by another route but it hasn’t happened yet.
No worries about not taking me seriously. Don’t like that dig at Neil.
Richardthughes,
Yes, Rich.
I would like to see someone brave enough to propose something specific that can be known but which is not accessible to scientific investigation.
I’m sure there was quite a bit of discussion of logical positivism on an earlier thread. I recall watching a video of A J Ayer (he of the amazing trousers) confessing his error in investing too much in the idea.
Indeed! Gregory? Anyone?
I don’t quite follow the sports metaphors, but OK. 🙂
Yes, there was a lot of name-dropping there. I did that in order to illustrate that there’s a whole tradition at work here, that different philosophers have made different contributions to — with varying degrees of importance. (For example, I think that Quine should be regarded as much less important than he’s regarded as being by Anglophone philosophers.)
Much as I enjoy talking here about Sellars, his significance consists primarily in making clear and articulate the ideas that can be found in Hegel and Peirce. I’m actually far more of a Hegelian than I’m a Kantian or a naturalist, especially with regard to the essentially historical and social character of knowledge.
But, like a lot of 20th-century post-Hegelians, I worry that his metaphysics gives too much priority to spirit, leaves nature behind, and doesn’t give nature its due. Similarly — and this is really the converse side of the same problem — his epistemology gives too much priority to the concept and not enough to the object. Right now I’m trying to write a conference paper on Sellars’s odd remark that we need a theory of non-conceptual content in order to avoid the dialectic that leads from the Phenomenology to 19th-century idealism. I have a vague sense of what Sellars meant (or should have meant) by that.
And of course my work on Adorno and Merleau-Ponty is animated by what they take over from Hegel, and their criticisms of him. The book is basically about how Merleau-Ponty helps us solve problems that Sellars tried to solve but couldn’t, because he didn’t have a robust theory of the role of embodiment in perception. The follow-up to the book will show that the distinction I draw between discursive intentionality and somatic intentionality can be used to explicate and defend Adorno’s thesis of “non-identity” between concept and object.
Lately I’ve taken some interest in the “speculative realist” movement — esp. Meillassoux and Brassier — but I won’t be contributing to it anytime soon. Too much to do as it is!
Anyway, suffice it to say that rumors of my Anglocentrism are greatly exaggerated!
Alan Fox,
You’re just proving yourselves to be small-hearted scientistic people, lacking imagination, intuition and emotion. ‘Just the rational.’ Mechanical only. Reduce to instrumentality.
It is simply impoverished humanistically, anthropically.
Then I’d suggest exploring Pitirim A. Sorokin. (That should fly right over France from Komi to Harvard, maybe gifting you some rain.)
I don’t recall the specifics of that discussion. I do think there’s something fascinating about Carnap’s thought that metaphysics is poetry mistakenly transposed into the medium of scientific language. But I very much doubt that this view can be separated from Carnap’s semantics, which is a failure because it relies on an empiricist theory of meaning and doesn’t distinguish between semantics and epistemology. (This was by design — the whole point of the logical positivist program is to replace epistemology by semantics, and that’s a dismal failure. The contemporary version of that project — trying to replace epistemology with cognitive science — will also end in failure.)
Quine
So is Quine saying you should be able to recognize an a priori claim by the absence of fact?
I’m just me Gregory.
Gah. “Variability” should be “verifiability”
Alan Fox,
Yup. Elevator ready. Goodness, even Henri Bergson or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin! You’ve likely gone beyond the ‘Anglo-centrism’ KN quivers about, given that you speak French daily. Why not bring that elevation ici? No, just secularization, just laicisation?
Not sure the goal of cognitive scientists is to replace epistemology. We could do with some input from a neuroscientist. I wonder where Dr. Liddle has got to?.
That’s pretty much right.
Quine is saying that, if there were analytic claims, then they would be claims which can be known to be true (or false) even though they do not refer to anything sensory or factual — they would be claims that are true (or false) “by meaning alone”.
However, Quine argues against that idea; that’s the whole point arguing against the analytic/synthetic distinction. Whereas I think that Quine was mistaken to argue against that distinction; I’m in favor of it.
A further feature of Quine’s thought, which he inherits from the logical positivists, is that the analytic and the a priori are the same thing. What makes Quine really fascinating is that he ends up with the astonishing position that there is no a priori knowledge at all. It’s hard to convey to non-philosophers what a revolutionary step this was — I mean, everyone from Plato onward insisted that there was some a priori knowledge. (Plato famously held that all knowledge is a priori!)
I should clarify — I don’t think it’s the goal of cognitive scientists to replace epistemology with cognitive science — I think it’s the goal of some (but not all) philosophers of cognitive science to replace epistemology with cognitive science!
If A = B and B = C, then A = C.
How would you check that out, without invoking it or similar “laws”? It’s what we bring to empiricism (or idealize from expectations), not something that we find (at least not in the ideal sense) via empiricism.
Maybe that’s not what was meant by “specific,” but it is a specific “law,” so I don’t see why it wouldn’t serve as an answer without the question being made more specific, at least.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
On reflection perhaps Petrushka should have added “about the real world”. I sort of assumed it.
I find these discussions boil down to disagreements about the definition what it means to know, what things are subject to knowing, and what it means to be true or justified (if you go with justified true belief as a starting point for a definition of knowledge).
I know the angle of a triangle add to 180 degrees in Euclidean geometry.
I know my parents loved me.
I know Beethoven was a better musician than Bieber is.
I know that torturing babies is wrong.
That’s a ‘scientific’ controversy for ‘skeptics’ (aka atheists and agnostics) here at TSZ. You are obviously not enlightened if you think otherwise 😉
But that seems irrefutable. Without sensory input – learning, especially – our brains don’t develop fully. We’d be mental cabbages. So there can be no a priori knowledge.
Maybe this can make Petrushka’s challenge more precise:
I’m probably not being entirely fair in setting up the challenge, because to me it’s pretty clear that the answer to this question is “no”.
I do think that if the distinction between a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge is drawn in the right way, a commitment to a priori knowledge is compatible with what we know from cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology. Specifically, the a priori/a posteriori distinction doesn’t require that there’s “innate knowledge”.
That’s what I like about Nietzsche, there are always a prioris, or at least biases.
And, unless our brains didn’t evolve, there almost certainly have to be–even if these were merely from the way the brain is “laid out,” retinotopical map and all of that (the fact that these don’t develop properly without stimulation doesn’t change the fact that there’s a typical manner in which they develop with stimulation).
Glen Davidson
The angle of any real triangle in the physical world will not. Defining an abstract concept is not the sme as knowing something.
Your real parents sold you and you were raised by imposters.
You know you like Beethoven. Millions disagree.
You know torturing babies is wrong for the same reason you know sugar is sweet and vinegar is sour.
This one fits in the “how far are ‘skeptics’ willing to go ridiculous” category:
Maybe petrushka’s real parents discovered that he had contracted the ‘atheist gene’ and therefore decided to sell him? 😉 His real parents were Abrahamic believers, but he doesn’t respect the verticality of their faith.
The avoidance of reality by some people, like petrushka, here at TSZ is astonishing. It goes back to whether someone can be a theistic realist, as KN agrees is possible, or whether one can *only* be a naturalist realist.
Pan(en)theist blog founder Lizzie at least believes that theistic realism is a ‘real’ possibility, even if she has lost her faith while ‘becoming’ a ‘cognitive scientist.’
That moderator Alan Fox is showing his scientistic colours here is not surprising. For most people scientism and theism are mutually exclusive. One can be a scientist and a theist, however, quite comfortably. It’s the ideologies that get in the way and exclude, which is why WJM and Joe F. use the awkward term ‘scientismist’.
“The Intellectual Snobbery of Conspicuous Atheism” – Emma Green
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/the-intellectual-snobbery-of-conspicuous-atheism/284406/
I chose my examples just to illustrate that it does result, in the end, in arguments about what it means to know and what can be known.
I cannot know things about abstract objects. OK.
My parents are not the people that raised me. Maybe I was adopted. I actually thought you might say their love was a pretense.
Musical taste is purely subjective and cannot be known. OK.
Moral values are the same things as taste preferences for food. Not too many philosophers would go that far, but I do agree that many would agree that you cannot know moral things in the same way you know that you are looking at a computer monitor.
I personally agree with KN’s formulation but I think that, in the end, it is for pragmatic reasons, not something that can be justified deductively.
ETA: fix thoughtless wording
My post was intended to be humorous and serious.
I can’t tell how Gregory read it. I haven’t detected any sense of humor in Gregory.
I have to assume that kicking the stone was intended to be both humorous and serious.
Here’s how I read these discussions:
When I read “real” I read “billiard ball.”
When I read non-material or spiritual, I read “not-billiard ball.”
I think physics gave up billiard ball a century ago. I see no difference between what physics is doing and what philosophers used to do, except that physicists tend to agree with each other about methods and ground rules. And as a result, they make progress.
It strikes me that several centuries ago, science was inhabited by people who thought perhaps they could reveal God’s clockwork. Some of them were Deists, who believed the physical world had been set in motion and left to run in it’s created perfection. we merely had to study it to reveal the divine plan.
It seems to me that modern physicists are heir to that line of inquiry. Looking for Galileo’s divine alphabet with which the universe is written.
It seems to me that many theists, including creationists and IDists, have lost the thread, and haven’t kept up with that program of inquiry. They are lost in 19th century and earlier conceptions of matter and causation.
Anyway, that’s what I think of when I try t think about realism. I visualize an infinite onion of regularities that can be teased out with observation and experimentation. I do not expect any final grand unified theory of everything, but I do expect occasional plateaus or resting places, from which we can pause and consider that we have made progress.
Doesn’t actually show the sentiment to be wrong though, does it?
Richardthughes,
Exactly. It’s intellectual snobbery. Empty nihilism on a personal-global scale. Projection of vitalistic despair by atheists/agnostics onto others. No cackled appearance of mere ‘skepticism’ or smarm changes that.
Richardthughes,
I’m puzzled by Gregory’s link to this obscure article. It’s ostensibly a book review. Does Gregory think we should buy these books?