I’ll intervene on this conversation started by S. Joshua Swamidass as my guess is he’s going to mangle terms & then claim mastery over them, as he has done in the past on the topic of ‘methodological naturalism’ (MN). Paul Nelson (of micro-/macro- distinction) has posted here in the past & has done a fine job of staying more neutral, scholarly and welcoming to discussion than most IDists at the DI. It would be welcome for Nelson to clarify, re-iterate or to add any points here that Swamidass might not wish to address at PS, or in case the naive scientism cum MN lobby grows too loud there.
This is one of those topics where in my view Swamidass scores quite low in credibility and coherency (much like I score in biology! = P). This makes sense because he has little training and doesn’t seem to have done much personal reading in philosophy, social sciences or humanities. Paul Nelson, on the other hand, did a PhD in the philosophy of biology. So if Swamidass starts to try to out-philosophize Nelson, things could get hilarious quickly, as they have in the past, e.g. with Jonathan Burke, who discovered predecessors to GA -> GAE that Swamidass missed & had to add at the last minute.
Let’s see if Swamidass is ready to learn if the term ‘methodological naturalism’ is really a sword he wants to fall on or not. So far, it has been. Nelson, as do I, rejects MNism, & not just as a misnomer.
In the highlighted thread, we see Swamidass ask Nelson for clarification on a topic that Swamidass has obviously done a little bit of armchair talk with buddies about, but hasn’t actually got into the main course yet. Swamidass insists, “For the record, I think MN is legitimate, but that debate is a separate issue.”
Swamidass keeps repeating the same clumsy and imprecise language, then insisting there is nothing to debate about it. He continues to use a word duo (M+N) that he says he thinks is ‘wrong,’ yet without making any attempt to get beyond it. Why not? If he has to hear it 20 times before he understands it, then despite his proficiency in biology & computation, that might be what he needs in order to learn in other fields, such as philosophy. MN is not simply ‘legitimate’ or ‘illegitimate;’ it is rather an expression of ideology about the way (natural) science is done, i.e. its methods. That Swamidass doesn’t realise the inherent bias in the way he is framing the conversation explains much about why people communicating about ‘origins’ topics don’t understand each other.
The reasons Swamidass won’t debate are because, 1. He doesn’t have an original place to stand that was not already taken first by others who likely know the field better than he does, 2. Debate for Swamidass seems always to quickly turn into a kind of non-mainline Christian evangelical apologetics, similar to the BioLogos model, at least how he frames his ‘Empty Chair Confessional’ scenario, as if he were the Science Pope. And when you can’t evangelize evangelcalism to your opponent, or claim A&E as your own in front of them, then the game is up, and, 3. He’s trying to promote peace when there is no peace, using inciting arguments (re: MN) & doing so while flying the confessional banner of the very community that has been among the most protesting & agitating & stubborn & backward (consistent biblical literalistic bigotry & anti-science misunderstanding) in the conversation. And yet he hasn’t yet issued a word of apology for even the METHOD he is using, which comes right out of the same fundamentalist-creationist playbook that caused the problems in the first place and which in his own way, he exacerbates even while ‘scientifically’ preaching peace.
Mature catholic and orthodox Abrahamic monotheists have no need for the highly ideological, scientistic ‘peace’ that Swamidass would sell them on the way down the road to further separation of theology/worldview & human life.
“1. Using God as an explanation is disallowed by MN in scientific work.”
Technically speaking, that comes closer to ‘methodological anti-supernaturalism’ (ASN) than to promoting a naturalism-only approach to methods used in natural sciences. The latter would require a positive signification that Joshue doesn’t adequately provide, which is why the DI produces books like “The Nature of Nature.” It is difficult to figure why Joshua doesn’t understand that MASN does not = MN. Yet he keeps repeating it. One could write it down to a kind of narrow thinking required to ‘do biology’ that may make it difficult to explore other fields of thought respectfully and on their own terms, & thus to try to better understand than just dictating standard-fare (most often, but not always, atheism-driven) MN to philosophers.
Anti-supernaturalism is a different position from pro-naturalism. Methodological naturalism is still a type of naturalism. Swamidass can’t seem to come to grips with or allow his own English language to reflect this in his thoughts. So instead he might pause to ask why philosophers, not to mention social scientists and humanities scholars rather widely, reject the ideology that Swamidass thinks he is defending by simply calling it ‘good science’. We don’t want Swamidass’ naturalistic ideology hidden behind the term ‘methodological,’ yet Swamidass insists we must accept it or be negatively counted.
Sorry Swamidass, ideology is not just automatically ‘good science’ because a PhD in biological computation with a medical degree says it is & encourages others on a soapbox to echo him.
2. Wrong based on answer to 1.
“3. The idea was to discuss an intelligent designer rather than God, design rather than creation, and remove references to Scripture. In fact this was all an attempt to abide by MN.” – Swamidass
How can Swamidass get this so wrong? Is it because he is fixated on MN as a personal ideology he holds as a natural scientist? I have asked Joshua in the past to clearly articulate what a non-naturalist natural scientist looks like & he has avoided answering as if a plague were chasing him. In other words, in his ideological incoherence, he claims both to reject naturalism & accept naturalism at the same time. And now having been caught doing this, doesn’t wish for it to be pointed out. It would be better if Swamidass could learn his error openly & move forward with a clearer message. I believe Paul Nelson could help him do this.
First, it’s an Intelligent Designer, capitalized, if one has a proper sense of Divine Names. C’mon, Paul, don’t just peter out on this – take it head-on! Yes, the DI won’t talk about the Intelligent Designer as part of the ‘theory,’ which is rather minimalist in the end anyway, definitely not a ‘design revolution’. IDism in short: information, therefore mind & therefore a better chance of divine Creation than according to an atheist worldview. Apologetics. Yet Swamidass doesn’t seem to realize how using & promoting the ideology of MN, actually furthers the atheism he somewhat vaguely claims he is against. And the problem is that he can’t just up his science-talk in giving an answer to this because it is not a ‘strictly scientific’ observation or problem he is facing. Pushing harder the wrong way isn’t a good choice. So, when Swamidass gets off his high Science horse, we may actually be able to have a better conversation that takes the ideology of MN more seriously than Swamidass currently does, perhaps just because he can’t see the other side.
4. Facepalm.
“5. Consequently there has been a shift in ID. Rather than work within MN, more and more ID proponents want to get rid of MN in questions of origins.”
No, IDists have been consistently anti-MN since the beginning of the Movement. I’ve been following it since @2002. “In questions of origins,” one of the problems is the scientistic attitude Swamidass brings to the table in contrast with Nelson. Then Swamidass has the gall to ask: “How would you rewrite your narrative in a way that could be common to us?”
I realise the guy deserves some slack, but how about Swamidass making an attempt to rewrite his non-mainline ‘narrative’ in a way that doesn’t particularly privilege the ideology that he holds in the conversation? It would be more productive to instead open up the conversation even to people who patiently, consistently & faithfully reject the scientistic ideology of MN. If Swamidass is unwilling to even consider that it is he who might be misperceiving things, perhaps due to his philosophical immaturity & loose use of concepts & terms, progress with Nelson might indeed take place, which could be good for the future of ‘the conversation.’
One of Nelson’s flaws, of course, is his trust in the work of Stephen C. Meyer, whose definition of ‘history’ leaves more than a lot to be desired. I was quite surprised at what I discovered at Cambridge where Meyer wrote his dissertation & don’t think they appreciate being linked as Meyer & the DI likes to advertise. Let’s leave Meyer out of this & listen to what Nelson has to say.
I’d pick Nelson over Swamidass when it comes to MN. And of course Steve Fuller has gone perhaps even further than Steve Dilley, who Nelson recommended to Swamidass, in exposing MN. Whether or not Nelson can finally get through to Joshua on this topic is another issue. Sometimes more attempts is all it takes.
Nelson wrote that: “MN is the current dividing line because the ID community is united by the bare proposition that “intelligent design is empirically detectable in nature.” In order for design to be detectable, of course, it must have some observational or empirical content which does not reduce ultimately to physics. That’s intelligence as a distinct cause, issuing in distinct effects. MN forbids appeals to intelligence (i.e., as a basic or fundamental constituent of reality). There’s the conflict.”
Here’s where Nelson starts to go off the rails. 1) It’s Intelligent Design, not intelligent design’. The detectability of divine Intelligence, as Phillip Johnson & Charles Thaxton, along with Olsen & Bradley believed & believe. 2) Design is already ‘detectable’, but it is not the end goal simply to ‘detect’ some kind of thing (ontology). Rather, IDism is about implications, the implication of a Mind beyond matter. Good natural science and social science can & do already “appeal to intelligence”. I was speaking with a design theorist & reading a design thinking paper recently. But that’s not ‘Intelligent Design Theory’ and never will be. 3) Science is not a ‘forbidding’ field or discipline. Nelson himself couldn’t see a coherent, clear, valuable ‘Intelligent Design Theory’ even recently, in his own words. The IDists simply have provided no strictly scientific evidence of the instantiation of what they call ‘Intelligent Design’ and instead depend on probabilism & sciency apologetics, the latter much like the earlier ‘creationist’ movements.
So, in the end Swamidass is right about at least this: “The issue is divine intelligence, and the attempt to recognize design without considering the designer (neither approach works in science).” Biology differs considerably from theology & theological biology isn’t welcome; it’s intentionally schismatic. Yet Swamidass is otherwise wrong to suggest that ‘science’ is & only ever can be ‘naturalistic,’ so it’s a rather small & narrow view he is espousing, in the name of Science.
At least S. Joshua Swamidass might learn the difference between philosophy and ideology from Nelson in this conversation. He may then come to realize he’s been foisting a figment of his own imagination that needn’t have been constructed. Then again, he may just shrink back into typical disciplinary language that wreaks of natural scientism, ideological naturalism, biologism & reductionism again. Whatever he does, because I’m calling him out on it here and he doesn’t like being called out away from PS, Joshua will likely deny it all or just ignore it in public because he can’t seem to figure any other way out of the philosophical corner he’s pained himself into than to blame the messenger. Sad to see such an ethically-challenged scientist.
Properly understood, ‘methodological naturalism’ denotes ideology, not ‘good science.’ If Nelson would go further than he has in the past and acknowledge this, a different, likely better conversation would open up. The problem is that Swamidass hasn’t yet shown he’s ready to travel that road. Maybe Nelson will help him get there towards meeting next year with his former ‘hero’ (as Swamidass once briefly called) Behe.
Why so cranky? I already told you that miraculous messages in the sky would be a good start. I confess that I am a bit of a suspicious bastard, but a full supernatural media offensive, like in the old days, would probably sway me eventually. Hell, it would convince everybody. It just doesn’t happen.
That radish trick probably won’t cut it, though.
Gregory,
Ignoring your childish insults for now, surely scientists ‘doing science using natural scientific methods’ is precisely what MN means? The methodology (‘doing science’) is naturalistic (‘using natural scientific methods’).
I don’t see where ideology comes into this. It is not as if a scientist working this way has to be a committed naturalist. I have worked with fellow scientists of pretty much every major religious belief, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus (thanks to having been employed in a large multinational), they did their science ‘using natural scientific methods’ which means that in their work they adhered to MN.
I think you are badly confusing MN with metaphysical naturalism. Something you have in common with the ID’ers here.
= P
Could you possibly bring it back to the focus of the OP, Corneel? Are you trying to promote MNism to phoodoo, or just more responsible & considerable engagement with the use of natural-physical scientific methods?
Do you acknowledge the distinction between MNism & natural scientific methodologies? Do you believe social & cultural ‘scientists/scholars’ should restrict themselves to ‘naturalistic’ ideology to inform their studies & research?
Of course, and no one has raised this yet – because people have simply not been adequately or sufficiently trained to understand or even anywhere near properly communicate about ‘ideology’ if they grew up & were educated in the USA, Canada, UK, New Zealand or Australia – what this means also is that either ‘intelligent designism’ or ‘intelligent design creationism’ (although the latter doesn’t fit with most IDist leaders views or positions) are ideologies too.
We saw Paul Nelson’s somewhat agreeable response to my suggestion that we call MNism an ‘ideology’ earlier in this thread & what he also calls ideological there.
It is only if people start treating features of this conversation on a level playing field that progress can be made. Will the atheists/agnostics in this conversation ever allow or enter onto that level playing field?
Corneel,
Well, look at it this way. There is already enough evidence in this miraculous world of ours that some, what 60-80%?, of all people in the world believe in a supernatural being. So for those billions of people, they consider what exists now as evidence.
All you have really done is say, well, it doesn’t convince me. So that is not really a standard of what constitutes evidence. So when the materialists say, well, there is no evidence for the supernatural, we have two conclusions.
One, there are the people who will say nothing can be evidence, it just always remains within the “we can’t explain it” realm.
Two, there are those like you who say there can be evidence, but so far you have not seen any that convinces you. But if that is the standard, then you are a very small minority. So to say evidence doesn’t exist would be false. Its just not the evidence you want.
Oh, my. What an eye opener. I realize now how my staunch commitment to ideological naturalism in SSH prevented me from considering the obvious possibility that sky fairies might have access to my private keys.
I’ll need to up my game. Thanks, Gregory!
What I said was, you seem unable to distinguish between evidence and conclusions. What you are presenting is your conclusion. Saying the gods are descending from heaven for a photo op is your interpretation of what you are seeing.. Just like hearing thunder is proof of Thor, what else could it be? How do you KNOW these are gods? How do you KNOW you are not hallucinating? How do you KNOW that a Buddhist might think he’s seeing something entirely different? Evidence is not interpretation.
Flint,
Right, I just described the two possible camps . One says there can’t be evidence for the supernatural. And the other says, “Well, there could be but I haven’t seen any so far.”
Do you care to explain which you believe?
There’s actually a third option. There will be people who say “what’s going on here? How can we figure it out. If we guess what’s happening and we guess wrong, how can we know our guess was wrong?”
When nearly everyone in the world believed that evil spirits caused disease, was that evidence that evil spirits DO cause disease? Disease is evidence of something, no question about it. But doubting that evil spirits are the cause is entirely different from denying that disease exists because evil spirits might not.
Now, if the supernatural does something observable (produces evidence), one possible hypothesis is that this is the supernatural in action. Next, how would you go about determining this? What would be your null hypothesis?
Neither one. I would say that whatever phenomena we observe needs to be studied. I’m not exactly saying I haven’t seen any such evidence so there can’t be any, I’m saying that IF I’m seeing the supernatural at work, I’m not satisfied that every possible alternative possibility has been ruled out.
Flint,
Its either possible for their to be evidence of the supernatural or its not possible. You aren’t really going to argue that if one asks can there be evidence for the supernatural yes or no, that your answer is-THE THIRD WAY! ?
Its not either there can or can’t be, instead its the way that can’t be articulated way. Skeptics never fail to amuse.
Flint,
In the case of the design argument what we are observing are things that we believe a mind can produce but no evidence of that capability when those species originated here on earth. So a supernatural hypothesis is a possibility.
Flint,
Ok, you are going to go down the bananas logic road. Instead of committing to either there can be or can’t be evidence for the supernatural, you are taking the “but baloney sandwiches are good” route.
Sorry, I am not going down the looney tunes rabbit hole with you.
Why not all of them?
Wrong again Bill. We have zero evidence a mind can physically manipulate matter to manufacture species. We do have a huge amount of empirical evidence species evolved through known natural unintelligent processes.
As usual you mistake your religious-based wishful thinking for science.
Adapa,
In the words of Mung who I miss…..hi troll.
Trying, Gregory. I am trying.
Sorry, but I got lost in your terminology. I am not sure what you mean by natural scientific methodologies, if not using the scientific method adopting only natural explanations (i.e. MN).
That’s not it, it’s just that I have no idea what their methodology would look like if it were informed by a non-/supernatural ideology. Weren’t you asked to provide an example of a non-natural hypothesis at some point?
Good question, per the Catholic Church “According to the church, miracles, or divine events that have no natural or scientific explanation, serve as proof that the person is in heaven and can intercede with God to change the ordinary course of events.”
“Toward that end, a Vatican-appointed Miracle Commission sifts through hundreds or even thousands of miraculous claims. Typically, the commissions are composed of theologians and scientific experts.
Nearly all, or “99.9 percent of these are medical miracles,” O’Neill said. “They need to be spontaneous, instantaneous and complete healing. Doctors have to say, ‘We don’t have any natural explanation of what happened,'” O’Neill said.
A woman whose breast cancer was cured wouldn’t qualify, for instance, if she was given a 10 percent chance of survival — she would need to be told there was no chance of survival before any divine intervention, said the Rev. Stephan Bevans, a theology professor at the Catholic “
So it seems the miraculous / supernatural depends on our ability to judge there is “ no chance of survival” and the level of our medical knowledge. Strangely there no report of someone being decapitated being miraculously healed.
He was an expert on what constitutes a troll.
Corneel,
“Weren’t you asked to provide an example of a non-natural hypothesis at some point?”
Yes. It’s simply a question of who will accept the answer provided & who won’t. For example, your own name – did it arise by a ‘natural’ process *alone*?
Human choice. Is that just reducible to ‘natural processes’? Or does my choice somehow transcend, at least in some ways, my biology or physiology alone? Can a person’s ideas break free from being under captivity to ‘naturalistic’ ideology? To me, the answer is crystal clear. And what we see is that naturalists most often give quite different answers regarding ideology than do theists.
In the approach of SSH, where multiple competing hypotheses is the norm, we don’t usually stop at a single (canonical) answer as if that’s enough to explain very complex things.
That’s why I keep coming back to this topic of MNism. Lacking the relevant philosophical or science studies training to know better, Swamidass is siding with atheists/agnostics & adopting their ideology, which was taken as a gift by atheists & anti-theists for obvious reasons. It’s not just a question of whether or not he’s ‘defending good science’; it’s additionally the ideology that he is promoting while he attempts to de-convert YECists (which I’m quite fine with), that is problematic.
Don’t blame me. It’s all you guys that seem to be happy with zero evidence.
On a more serious note: I essentially agree with what you wrote. The issue is that we are not talking about scientific evidence. For most people, the evidence concerns things like personal revelation, or seeing beauty in nature, or finding meaning in religion, rather than science’s rational contemplation of objective facts. So in the end, it comes down to faith (or lack thereof).
Yeah well. Get back to me when you big majority have reached consensus.
I believe Gregory is trying to get back OT, so I will give you the last word in this.
Corneel,
Fixed that for you:
What argument?
What can minds produce, apart from thoughts?
Maybe. How do you suggest we test a “supernatural” hypothesis?
OK, so bring on some evidence Corneel doesn’t want. Examples, please!
faded_Glory,
Right. They’ve rendered their God testable.
My larger point is that there are many supernatural hypotheses that can be rendered testable in this way. MN is therefore a mistake. It locks science out of areas in which it is perfectly competent to operate.
Alan,
It depends on the hypothesis, obviously. Testing YEC is different from testing a hypothesis regarding the differential efficacy of prayer to one God over another.
Depends on your definition of “supernatural”. In my view “supernatural” is synonymous with “untestable”. Typical is the argument that the YEC god is refuted by refuting claims of a 6,000 year old Earth. The issue is the link between god” or any other “supernatural” claim and reality. Coincidence is not indicative of causation. “We prayed and she got better!”?
Especially in having one! 🙂
Not seeing a scientific hypothesis yet. Let me grant you, for the sake of the argument, that we should not restrict the causes of making choices to any impersonal spatio-temporal phenomena. How does the psychologist (? who studies those things?) proceed with formulating and testing her non-natural hypothesis?
Timeo anti-theistos et dona ferentes.
keiths,
Finally a use for that like button.
keiths:
newton:
I’m not seeing a problem here. Let X be a logically impossible act of an omniGod. Then the hypothesis “God did X” is already false by definition, and we don’t need to test it empirically.
It’s all consistent.
Corneel,
Don’t like the like button? What’s not to like?
Isn’t methodological naturalism supposed to be a claim about the limits of scientific explanations? If so, then all the methodological naturalist need say is that empirical science is neutral about whether or not free will involves any transcendence of biology. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but the methodological naturalist doesn’t think that science can answer that question one way or the other.
I think that this question about whether methodological naturalism is independent of metaphysical naturalism is related to the debate between instrumentalism and realism in philosophy of science. For one can easily imagine an instrumentalist like van Fraassen endorsing methodological naturalism precisely because of the limits it imposes on the scope of science.
It’s quite clear that methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism are separable commitments, and that the former does not entail the latter (though the latter does entail the former).
So if there’s a complaint in the vicinity that some folks are too quick to leap from merely methodological naturalism to metaphysical naturalism, that complaint seems to me to be quite well justified.
I always bristle at this. Who is limiting enquiry? Those who claim there is “supernatural” stuff going on should supply the evidence. Why aren’t they?
Alan,
Which begs the question. We’ve had this conversation before.
YECs believe in a non-deceptive God who created the earth less than 10,000 years ago. Science shows that the earth is far older. Therefore the YEC God cannot exist.
Science has disproven a supernatural hypothesis.
I know. Repeating yourself and expecting a different outcome…
*chuckles*
Alan,
I’ve provided an example of a testable supernatural hypothesis. “Supernatural” is therefore not synonymous with “untestable”.
Don’t think so. Not my question, anyway. That question may be put thus:
In what way does “supernatural” differ from “imaginary”?
Have you? What was it?
Alan,
As if you needed a link.
That doesn’t work. Where’s the link between the age of the Earth and a particular god existing? Say the Earth turned out from observation and experiment to be indeed 6,000 years old. Would that show that a YEC version of a god existed? Where’s the link?
I claim to be the God of Old Earth. It’s 4.75 billion years old. The evidence is clear. Refute that if you can!
Alan,
Then where, precisely, is the error in my statement? I’ve numbered the sentences for convenience:
and he was refreshingly honest about it.
It might be helpful to bear in mind here that at least one version of methodological naturalism is anti-creationist as well as anti-atheist. On this version, if the available evidence doesn’t support a literal reading of a few chapters from Genesis, then so much the worse for that reading.
For my part, I am less interested in methodological naturalism than I am in verificationism or operationalism as an epistemic standard of empirical inquiry. These days I am very interested in how psychology became a science, so I’m reading From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James and also how philosophy as a discipline involved the rise of anti-psychologism, so Psychologism: The Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge is also quite helpful. That, together with reading up on Edward Tolman and some cybernetics, is giving me some nice tools with which to refine my understanding of the implications of cognitive science for epistemology.
So, to go back to my initial concern in this conversation — is there a difference that makes a difference between methodological naturalism and verificationism? — I still don’t have an answer to that. But, to the extent that there is a difference, it’s the verificationism that’s really important to me.
So much blather about terminology, and still, all we have is a personality difference between believer and show me.
Since the supernatural is not defined, anything could be evidence of it.
You are not attempting to grasp what I’m saying. It’s not that hard. IF we defined “the supernatural” as something capable of being observed in any way (we call such observations “evidence”), then of course there can be evidence of the supernatural. But evidence is almost invariably somewhat ambiguous. The sky is blue, we observe this, BUT is it blue because some supernatural agency caused it to be that way? Maybe so. How could we tell?
So just to be clear, you’re saying that since you believe human choice is supernatural, positing human choice as a hypothesis to explain something necessarily requires dispensing with MN?
When we were asking for a supernatural hypothesis, we were hoping you would advance a testable supernatural explanation for something, in this case, human choice, not just some blatant question begging.
Why aren’t we immortal?
Probably because then there would be no need to care for anyone.