According to the dim vagaries of recollection, my furtive efforts to be taken seriously over at Uncommon Descent were frustrated due to the perception that I am an atheist. (Curiously, when I explicitly said that I’d stopped referring to myself as an atheist, this was met with utter silence.) I had read Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, and despite my criticisms of the book, I thought it was promising in certain respects, and said as much. (I also pointed out that some reviews were much more favorable than others, but they didn’t want to notice the favorable reviews, because that would disrupt their martyr-narrative.) And more generally, I emphatically distanced myself from what I call the “Epicurean” interpretations of Darwinism, e.g. Monod and Dawkins. But for the occasional exchange with a visitor to UD, this was met with silence or scorn from the UD regulars.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I see today “Making common cause with non-materialist atheists“. Dembski is now seeking to make common cause with Nagel by distinguishing between naturalism and materialism in terms of two different distinctions: naturalism/theism and materialism/teleology (“teleologism”?). Interestingly, that’s pretty much the very same set of distinctions that got a distinctly chilly reception from the UD regulars, because I’m not a theist, let alone a Christian, and because I’m a pragmatist and not a rationalist.
It amuses me that Dembski is willing to countenance an intellectual alliance that the rank-and-file UD participants rejected.
Could you link to a typical thread? It would be helpful to get the background.
I guess Dr Dembski was under pressure to complete his book assignment from the Templeton Foundation, having taken an advance nearly ten years ago.
See
link
My “contributions” are here, here, and here.
I’ll be honest — looking back on those threads, I was treated better than I remember. I guess I felt bullied enough by Arrington, Murray, and Kairosfocus that that colored my memory of the exchanges about Nagel.
Hardly. Aristotle’s Metaphysics is called that because it came after Physics in the standard Hellenistic arrangement of his works (which remains the same today when his works are arranged as a whole), and thus the term “metaphysics” began to take on the meaning it has now because it was the subject of the work that came after Physics. We don’t really know why the arrangement has been thus, nor is there any reason to think that Aristotle considered Metaphysics to be different in kind from Physics, other than the broader scope of Metaphysics–there’s certainly enough overlap in the two works.
Dembski’s “science of information” has typically been about as good as Aristotle’s “science” in Physics–I’ll give him that. Aristotle at least had a good excuse.
Glen Davidson
I know. It’s fascinating. It’s almost as though he’s actually been listening to some of us.
I had a read. It’s funny how the memory fails (I commented in one thread and have no memory of it). The other posters seemed to ignore you mostly. I think you have the same effect on UD commenters that you have on me. You stun them into silence because they can’t think of anything sensible to say!
GlenDavidson,
I’m sure Dembski knows how the book Metaphysics acquired its title. The further question is whether one needs to understand being-qua-nature (the Physics) before understanding being-qua-being (the Metaphysics). To the best of my knowledge, we don’t know which book Aristotle wrote first or which topic he taught first to his students. So the priority of science over metaphysics is a philosophical prejudice that we bring to bear in making sense of Aristotle, rather than one that Aristotle himself had.
But Aristotle does say — in the Metaphysics — that we progress from what is first in relation to us towards what is first in itself. In other words, we start off from what is most obvious and immediate — such as our sense-perceptions of objects — and proceed to the ultimate constituents of reality. So saying that we have to get clear on the science before doing the metaphysics is not alien to Aristotle’s thought, either.
In my own view, we need to figure out the science in order to do metaphysics because metaphysical speculation is only constrained by reason, and that gives us an embarrassment of riches — there are infinitely many logically consistent possible worlds. So just figuring out what is necessary and what is possible will tell us nothing at all about what the actual world is like — only science can do that. So a scientific metaphysics is going to be much more constrained than a non-scientific metaphysics.
Yes, which is why we continually bring up the fact that ID has no constraints, and is therefore meaningless.
What are they thinking about when they argue that a design sieve only works when you have ruled out natural causes? Isn’t that where Paley started, and isn’t that why Darwin wrote Origin?
Oddly, that post has now been deleted. The other one is still there, though, here.
And the EF has come full circle – we are back to Monod and teleonomy.
Lizzie,
Maybe they deleted it once they realized I’d linked to it and wanted to discuss it over here.
Agreed.
It’s more likely that there was a copyright complaint.
Perhaps we should take it as an implicit acknowledgment that his all-out war strategy was not working.
BUT THE CULTURE WAR!!!!
BOX sayeth:
So humans. made of matter and energy, are not intelligent?
or else, maybe xe means we’re not natural?
Well, he did say this
“I would go further than that and say that I value objective peer review. I always learn more from my critics than from the people who think I’m wonderful.”
Incidentally, the difficulties between Dembski’s current declared position, assuming the quotes are definitive, and that of Meyer have surfaced in the UD thread here. The poster RDFish, better known here and elsewhere as aiguy, seems to have begun to highlight the (shall we say) inconsistencies.
Here for example:
This seems vaguely relevant.
A new post by Casey Luskin at ENV: What to Expect When the Evolution Bubble Is About to Pop
The UD post is back up, but in revised form. The link to the new version is:
Making common cause with non-materialist atheists
(KN might want to update the link in the main post, or ask me to update it).
Comparing with the copy in my RSS reader, the new version quotes a lot less from Dembski (perhaps half as much). The same Nagel quotes seem to be there.