The Wedge Document, which appeared on the internet in 1999, is a curious thing. I don’t want to discuss is merits and demerits in this post, but what it says about fear: on the one side of the wedge, the fear that motivated its writing, and on the other side, the fear of those who felt targetted by it.
Because even though the document itself has ceased to have force, the mutual distrust remains.
Clearly, the writers of the wedge were very frightened by the prospect of what they call “materialism”, and view as both an ideology and an approach to science – so frightened that they seem almost afraid to give credence to the science lest it let a Materialist Foot in the door. “Materialist” science they said,
…portrayed human not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment.
But more importantly they went on to allege that:
Materialists denied the existence of objective moral standards, claiming that environment dictates our behavior and beliefs.
Now, I can quite understand the fear of any science that would engender such denial. But what is also deeply frightening to some of us is the idea that any science should be suppressed for fear of its moral implications. The Copernican model was rejected for far too long because the Church worried that it would undermine the belief that humans inhabited a universe in which they were not central.
So how to heal the rift, rather than drive the Wedge in further? It was always part of my vision for this site that we would try to do the former rather than the latter. It’s not easy, and we have not always been successful. But I am not despondent. I suggest that two things are essential to the project, on the part of “materialists”:
Firstly, to make it clear that “materialism” is intrinsic to scientific methodology, not because of materialistic bias, but because scientific methodology is rooted in prediction. Contrary to the belief of many (materialists included), science does not seek to explain why things are the way they are at a fundamental level. Feynman puts it well here:
Science cannot go beyond a fundamental description of what the universe is like. Sure it can construct causal models up to a point, and we may keep moving that point closer and closer to the barrier, but it can’t make the barrier go away. Instead, it constructs a set of generalisable laws that allow us to predict things, more or less reliably. And a scientific model that predicts things better is preferred to a model that predicts things less well. No scientific model can be regarded as right, but some are less wrong than others. And only temporarily in the lead. All scientific models are provisional.
Secondly, I think that those of us who do not find a use for the concept of a creator God (I have worded that very carefully) need to make it clear that abandoning the idea of a creator God who made us for Her own purposes does not entail abandonment of purpose – it does not render our lives purposeless. I can breed a llama to carry my baggage. The llama may, and quite obviously does, have quite other ideas the purpose of her life (eating the hedge, for one). Not believing that we were made to serve the purpose of a putative creator God does not even mean that my only purpose is to serve myself.
And I think two things are also required of those on the other side of the wedge, both to do with real asymmetries between the positions:
Firstly, I think it is important to understand that science does not, and cannot, claim that God does not exist. Some scientists may do so – but it would not be a scientific statement. “Strong atheists” i.e. those who actually think the evidence suggests that there is no god, are rare, although many atheists would have a strong view that certain specific gods are non-existence (e.g. a Sun god; a God that can restore amputated limbs). But “God does not exist” is simply too vague a statement for anyone to get excited about an ism based on it. So there is an intrinsic asymmetry here: materialists are not, in general, claiming that theism is wrong, while theists are, in general, claiming that materialism is.
And the second thing is that I think it is important to understand is just how intrinsically provisional science is. Peer-review is imperfect, and so are the checks and balances built in to scientific methodology – but ultimately, science is designed so that mistakes are discovered. It lies behind all the tedious methodological procedures we have to go through – null hypothesis testing, blind rating, random sampling, replication, meta-analysis, funnel plots. Sure it is harder to get findings published that overturn consensus than those that support it – but that is as it should be, human nature being to err, and the quid pro quo is that if you do get it published, it will probably be in Nature. The big rewards in science are for the new and dramatic, not the been-there-done-that. In fact, I’d say that a much bigger problem in scientific publishing is the difficulty of getting replications published than the difficulty in getting novel work published. And again, there is a real asymmetry here: “materialists” are all too keen to engage with the “other side” – we are the ones regularly banned from discussions, not ID proponents; we are the ones with lax moderation policies, with “comments allowed”. Yes, we are frightened, but generally, fear takes the form of desire to engage, not refusal (and btw, no, Barry, I am not frightened to post at UD; I just see no point when I can post here where I know my words will remain undeleted).
Anyway, I’d be interested to hear from other people why they fear, or are angry, at the people on the other side of the wedge. Or, better still, if they are neither.
Academic and professional persecution. That’s not to say I wouldn’t be fearful of ISIS theists today or the Roman Catholic theists during the time of the inquisition that killed and tortured many Christians.
Something that must be understood, the Wedge began in academia, not in churches. Modern ID literature was pioneered in part by non-theists or agnostics tracing to the Wistar conference. A professed materialist, Robert Jastrow, persuaded me of ID. His book, God and the Astromers, persuaded me to return to the Christian faith…
The Wedge recruited church money. Lots of church going parents don’t want their kids to be atheists.
Maybe it never had much force to begin with. Much more to fear from atheists Kim Jong Un in North Korea and theists like ISIS in the middle east. Just as much to fear from economic collapse because of corrupt politicians…
I don’t know one person of any influence who joined or contributed to the ID movement in terms of money, time, or brain talent that did so primarily out of fear and anger. They did it because they believe ID is correct or deserves consideration.
They do get angry and fearful when respected scholars and scientists like Richard Sternberg and Dean Kenyon and Perceval Davis and Richard Lumsden get booted from academia.
The temperament of the ID community I think is best represented by someone like Michael Behe or Dean Kenyon. They aren’t ideological crusaders like Jerry Coyne or PZ Myers.
I don’t view UD’s cultural and philosophical obsessions as representative of the core temperament of the scientifically educated class within the ID community, maybe the non-scientifically educated. If Ken Ham is typical image of YEC, Ivy-league PhD Michael Behe is an image of an IDist. I obviously align with the IDists more in temperament. 🙂
The most striking controls on academic freedom that I have heard about in the US have been on people working in Christian institutions – for instance, Dembski had to retract his views on the Global Flood, and any academic, including biologists, working at Biola has to sign a statement of faith that includes:
As my grandfather used to say (not sure who he was quoting) “where the conclusion is prescribed, investigation is impossible”.
No – its straight from theology. Read your book.
But why cherry pick? The sides of the wedge are not distinguished by the proportion of “ideological crusaders”.
Oh, I’m sure that’s true. But that doesn’t mean that the fear and anger aren’t there. And while you might point to Richard Sternberg, I will point the Biola statement of faith. And you might defend Biola – I will argue that Expelled was full of falsehoods and misrepresentations.
We might both be right, or we might both be wrong (although it is hard to argue that Biola’s statement of faith isn’t what it appears to be – a ban on any biological investigation that brings into question the special creation of humankind).
So what are we frightened of, apart from the consequences of fear itself?
FWIW, I refused to enroll in religious institutions partly for the issue you raised. I chose secular schools because they were freerer for thought, but that’s not to say they were as free as I would feel safe with.
I can’t read peoples minds, so I don’t know the real motives.
I guess it is just possible that religion is a great racket for ripping of the gullible, and “they” were frightened at the prospect that their racket might be busted.
I have never understood this railing at materialism. As best I can tell, very few people are the kind of rigid materialists that they are attacking. It does seem to mostly be knocking down a strawman. But then Nagel tried his hand at knocking down that same strawman in his “Mind and Cosmos”, so it isn’t just a religious thing. Maybe its a conservative thing.
I don’t know if there’s much to actually fear from those with theocratic tendencies, but surely there’s a sort of threat to many individuals when you get inappropriate claims like “academic and professional persecution” simply because bad “science” like ID is generally trashed by academia. It should be.
Incorrect claims of “persecution” do resonate with many of the naive, and the possibilities afforded by science may be effectively cut off from a number of these individuals. It’s not something so much to “fear” as to oppose for its deleterious effects upon persons and on society at large.
Glen Davidson
I applaud you!
In 2005 I was invited to lunch with Howard Ahmanson (whom Phil Johnson dedicated his book to) and former ambassador Bruce Chapman (now head of the Discovery Institute) with Senator Santorum speaking. Fear and anger and cultural crusading wasn’t mentioned in that meeting. For that matter, I can’t remember many ID meetings where that was the topic!
The only time something like that came up was when I had dinner with the author of From Darwin to Hitler.
And in certain ID circles with a YEC component, we expect culture to decay because of the prophecy of the great apostasy and the rule of the anti-Christ on earth that is ordained and intelligently designed by God.
In order to teach math (or English, or gym, or shop, or….) in a Catholic school in Ontario Canada, you must be Catholic. This in spite of the fact that these schools are publicly funded.
No one can read minds of course, and while no one on either side has talked about ‘fear’ being a motive its not a stretch to infer fear as a partial motive for many. IDers seem to be unanimous in claiming that evolution and materialism are responsible for a cultural and moral decay in the West with all sorts of associated problems – things that anyone in their right mind would be afraid of.
Many ID opponents such as Ken Miller have suggested that if ID takes hold in the school systems it will damage science education, science and ultimately our economic competitiveness in the world. Again, things that everyone should be afraid of.
Elizabeth,
In your OP you are linking two topics, materialistic science and materialistic philosophy. In doing so I do believe that you are making exactly the same erroneous leap of thought that ID-ists do – that materialistic science is a vassal to materialistic philosophy. Indeed, this is the creed of Uncommon Descent:
Materialistic ideology has subverted the study of biological and cosmological origins so that the actual content of these sciences has become corrupted. The problem, therefore, is not merely that science is being used illegitimately to promote a materialistic worldview, but that this worldview is actively undermining scientific inquiry, leading to incorrect and unsupported conclusions about biological and cosmological origins…
I think this is simply incorrect. First of all, origins science has not become corrupted, because there was never a time when a non-materialistic origins science even existed, in the modern sense of the term ‘science’. I can agree that science is regularly used to promote a materialistic world view by certain people with a scientific background, which is unfortunate and in no way an unavoidable consequence of the scientific method, but rather an unfortunate tendency by these individuals to over-interpret scientific findings beyond their domain of validity. However, it is incorrect to say that the materialistic world view is undermining scientific inquiry, because when people do science using the commonly accepted methods they actually do so independently from their own personal world view and convictions, and science is done across the board by people with many different religious and non-religious convictions
However incorrect this perception is, it is obviously real and in my view the cause of much of the emotional bagagge in the ID debate. To narrow the gap, then, perhaps it would be fruitful to drill down deep into the question of how science should be done in practice to ensure no corruption from world views, materialistic or otherwise; and to emphasise, as you often do, that science as a discipline has nothing to say about the existence or non-existence of God because that question cannot be adressed using the scientific methodology. Agreement on the latter point should be relatively straightforward because ID-ers already maintain that their (claimed) scientific work has nothing to do with religion, as do non-ID scientists of course. All that the non-ID side needs to do is to disavow the likes of Richard Dawkins every time he oversteps the explanatory limits of science.
The first point is more tricky, becasuse after years of debate the ID community still doesn’t seem to understand that a theory needs more than simply appear to be a good (or even ‘the best’) inference from the data to be considered scientific. It absolutely needs to make testable predictions, and survive such actual tests. If the theory doesn’t have testable entailments it may still be an acceptable explanation, heck it may even be the correct explanation (but how would we ever know…?), but it should not claim the mantle of science.
fG
Faded Glory, maybe I am misreading your post (a far too common occurrence for me) but can science examine anything that is not “materialist”? I don’t see how the scientific process can be used to examine anything that is not “material”. But this may just be due to a lack of imagination.
Firstly, despite your observation above, science poses a clear threat to YEC beliefs and variations thereof, for obvious reasons.
ID, on the other hand, attempts to be more nuanced and sophisticated with respect to science and religion. In principle, science, as construed in your observation, poses no threat to ID. Thus, I’ve often wondered why ID types don’t put their energies into emphasizing this point to people. To wit: we can accept everything good science has to offer, because none of it threatens what we believe about God’s hand in creation, even if through inscrutable mechanisms compatible with whatever reality science now reveals. This approach insulates belief in God from all scientific discovery. (Whereas, any attempt to draw a line in the sand beyond which science can’t pass is destined for failure and embarrassment, as evidenced by events in the past several hundred years. Why intentionally subject oneself to continually having to retreat and make an inevitably futile stand on a new hill?)
The conclusion I’ve come to is as follows. The wedge strategy, at least as I see it, is aimed at giving people reason to (continue to) believe despite ongoing scientific discovery. But your observation about what science does and does not do, and why that doesn’t necessarily threaten religious belief, requires, in my opinion, a more nuanced understanding of science and religion than most people have, or care to have. It is a lot more concrete and satisfying to most people to be told, Look! Here’s something science can’t explain, ergo God.
Thus, I think the following quote from the movie “The American President” is appropriate here:
I don’t think it’s the case that the more well-educated ID proponents (scientifically and theologically speaking) don’t get what you’re saying. I think they can’t sell it.
I never heard of this wedge thing save in blogs of late.
Who cares what this guy says about God. Just because of a few ideas on physivs doesn’t make him know anything more then that.
Figuring out nature is seeing a created universe and that working like a something someone made so it would take care of itself.
A creator is strongly implied or down right insistent.
Just imagining the created thing is all there is will work also to figure it out.
On basic machinery but never any deeper into its intellectual structures.
Just like in physics. A bare surface investigation and occasional discovery of how it works. Yet really its not all that. In fact biology is where the complexity of nature is found. Not in the basic framework of the house. Rasther the living thing.
thats why healing is so sluggish in discovery.
You are putting your finger on another source of confusion and potential aggravation – what do people mean when they say ‘materialist’? The term has multiple connotations. You already put the scare quotes around it yourself. In the context of the ID debate I would say that the ID-ers pretty much mean ‘atheistic’, or to be slightly more charitable, ’caused by blind and undirected forces’ when they say ‘materialistic’. Conversely, they would consider a teleological cause (which may of course be God, but in a wider sense would include other forms of intelligence) as non-materialistic. Personally I see no reason why science could not investigate teleological causes, as long as they display some regularity that allows for testable predictions.
To add, ID-ers absolutely insist that intelligence is non-material. When it is pointed out that this is actually unknown, frenzy, insults and banninations follow quickly. In their view it makes no sense why some areas of science happily investigate intelligence (psychology and AI for instance), yet biology and origins science do not allow to posit intelligent causes for the observed complexities in nature. This is where they perceive corruption.
Hobbes:
They go further than that: they truly believe that Intelligence is a better explanation for the complexities in biology than whatever ‘materialistic’ stories science comes up with. Your suggestion is what the theistic evolutionists say. ID-ers hold this view in contempt. To them, God (as in ‘Intelligence’) should not be insulated from scientific discovery at all.
I wouldn’t describe myself as ‘fearful’. There are some forces in the world to be afraid of, but the pushing of a Design-led view of biology is not one of them.
I argue largely as a leisure activity. I don’t know why I find myself more active at this interface than other discussions I could enter, but I guess I just find it curious as to why the robustly evolutionary pattern of the data should be so flatly denied. In dangling a lure into the waters of the internet, a whole spectrum of nibbles can be had, from the rabid and incorrigible to the genuinely curious. Talking to the first is pointless, but it’s simply fun to try and organise one’s thoughts, to make a case. It is unlikely anyone will be persuaded by anything I say.
My own interest started at age 11, when I started collecting a weekly magazine (Purnell’s Encyclopedia of Animal Life), organised alphabetically by species. The first issue contained an evolutionary wall chart, and it made such sense of the Linnaean classification with which I was familiar from my bird-watching youth. Later, I went to university, and learned biochemistry and genetics and palaeontology and comparative morphology and … all the pieces simply slot neatly into place. I didn’t need to trim the edges or pound them with my fist. Evolution – it’s obvious! 😉
At no point did I feel this freed me to behave badly to my fellow humans or any other species, nor to devalue anything about Life. One can love collections of atoms with all one’s (atomic!) heart.
I am curious. Why a llama of all the examples you might have chosen?
I’ve never been happy with the term “materialism,” since people in the ID movement use it to mean at least the following: (a) the entities of fundamental physics are basically like really small billiard balls; (b) everything is composed of the entities described by fundamental physics [i.e. “fundamental particles”]; (c) everything can be understood in terms of the entities described by fundamental physics; (d) if some entity is conceived of by the classical philosophical tradition as being non-material, then materialists must deny the existence of that entity.
This is actually a bit different from how Dembski sets up the terms in his work. There, he defines design as the set-theoretic complement to “chance” and “necessity”, which are (let us recall) the two fundamental principles of Epicurean metaphysics, and which also figure prominently in Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity. Demsbki continues Plato’s polemic against the atomists by arguing that everything that cannot be explained in terms of chance and necessity must be a result of design. “Chance” and “necessity” are central to how Dembski sets up what he thinks “materialism” amounts to, but in doing so, he’s continuing a long tradition that runs from Plato through the Stoics down to pre-Darwinian, English (esp Anglican) natural theology.
I have used “explaining everything in terms of fundamental particles” instead of “explaining everything in terms of chance and necessity” because the former is unburdened by the interpretative bias of the Platonic tradition, and because it is actually not entirely clear to me what either “chance” or “necessity” mean at the quantum or sub-quantum levels. Perhaps, at the level of fields described in quantum field theory, the concepts of “chance” and “necessity” no longer make any sense.
(However, the ID crowd also conflates all this with “atheism” (as if there aren’t non-materialist atheists!) and sometimes, interestingly enough, with “liberal” and with “secular” — that’s when they show their true colors as reactionary culture warriors.)
From this, you get the following assertion: since there is no way that our traditional understanding of intentionality, consciousness, purpose, meaning, rationality or value can be explained entirely in terms of fundamental particles, then materialists must be committed to denying the existence of intentionality, consciousness, purpose, meaning, rationality, or value.
I am willing to allow that the following is true:
I’d be willing to bet that David Bentley Hart and Alex Rosenberg (to take the two extreme positions most often cited at Uncommon Descent) would agree on that much. Hart takes it as a reductio of materialism, and Rosenberg as a refutation of the tradition. Neither has much patience for intermediate positions, like Dewey’s or Dennett’s.
I also think that we should not aid and abet their confusion by refusing to distinguish between materialism as a metaphysical position and empiricism as an epistemological position. It might be that both materialism and empiricism are correct, and it may be that they are compatible — though the history of philosophy is full of anti-materialist empiricists and anti-empiricist materialists!
(For a recent attempt to defend the consistency of empiricism and materialism, I recommend “The Scientistic Stance: The Empirical and Materialist Stances Reconciled” , available here.)
In those terms, there’s nothing wrong with saying that we could (and do, of course) have empirical confirmation of claims that can’t be reduced to fundamental physics. Heck, we can’t even reduce chemistry to fundamental physics! Yet somehow we don’t see anyone saying that propanol must be intelligently designed, or that chemistry isn’t a real science!
Above, I described the materialist is someone who thinks that the entities described by fundamental physics have ontological priority over all other entities described by all other empirical discourses. In other words, the materialist thinks that if some theory T refers to X, but there’s no way of understanding X in terms of whatever entities fundamental physics gives us, then theory T is basically a fiction.
This is importantly different from someone who thinks that empirical discourses have epistemological priority over non-empirical discourses. In other words, here someone thinks that if some non-empirical discourse refers to X, but there’s no way of empirically confirming that there are X or anything functionally equivalent to X, then the non-empirical discourse has second-class epistemological significance.
Now, here’s the important thing: though anti-materialists accuse us of holding the first position, most of here do not — but many of us here do hold the second position.
There is no great name for the second position; “naturalism” is too easily conflated with the first position, “materialism”; “empiricism” invites a rehearsal of all the legitimate criticisms of classical empiricism and logical empiricism; “verificationism” invites more erudite but still legitimate criticisms of logical positivism. The second view should be called verifiicationism as long as one understands verification to be a criterion of epistemic significance — as it basically was for Hume! — and not of semantic content, as it became for Carnap.
In other words, epistemological verificationism does all the real work that most of us at TSZ would insist upon — “what’s the evidence for that assertion?” — without getting embroiled in having to defend either the dubious and discredited semantics of classical empiricism or the dubious and discredited metaphysics of Epicurean materialism.
I’m not going to defend epistemological verificationism without reservation — even as I’m writing this I can see some problems with it — but it might do us better than “materialism” or “empiricism”, as far as labeling goes.
Have you never walked a llama?
Llama trekking in Devon
I just don’t see the fear in the wedge strategy.
1. Phase I is the essential component of everything that comes afterward. Without solid scholarship, research and argument, the project would be just another attempt to indoctrinate instead of persuade.
3. Phase III. Once our research and writing have had time to mature, and the public prepared for the reception of design theory, we will move toward direct confrontation with the advocates of materialist science through challenge conferences in significant academic settings.
Elizabeth:
I could make a few suggestions. 🙂
Don’t create OP’s that argue that it’s all materialism all the way down.
Don’t make claims that there’s no evidence for God or gods.
Create more OP’s asking things like – why do we disagree on x or not agree on y or both agree/disagree on z?
One might ask things like what is the difference between materialism and the mechanical philosophy, or is there a physics of open systems?
One heck of a lot of dishonesty though. Probably why the professional IDiots marched to it for so long.
Mung,
Sadly (for you) its still just gapsism. There is no positive case, only wailing at the perceived insufficiencies of materialism.
Mung,
That. We’re terrified of the solid scholarship bit.
And that. Confrontation! Aaaarghhh!
I see Lizzie’s OP is not about the content, but Allan’s comment spurred me to glancing at the document. I see it says:
Did Paul Nelson ever publish his book on a powerful alternative?
I’ve moved a few posts about moderation strategy at UD to the sandbox.
Why not? Why should that frighten anyone?
Why not? It’s not even the same thing as claiming that God does not exist!
OK – that’s what this site is for, actually.
OK, would you like to write one?
From the document:
Looks like fear of the consequences of materialism to me.
Unless “devasting” and “undermined” and “virulent” are intended as complimentary.
Elizabeth, in answer to your series of “why not” questions I would think the answer rather obvious. Either that or I missed the point of this comment:
How do you feel whenever there’s a thread about Darwin and Nazi’s at UD? Makes you want to engage in rational discussion over the ideas does it?
Try this one:
There’s no evidence that anyone at TSZ is rational.
Or this one:
There’s no evidence for evolution.
These sorts of statements are not going to engender the sort of atmosphere you seem to be looking for.
Yet you wrote this @ UD:
Can I pin you down on that then? Is it your claim that heat shock proteins did not/could not have evolved and therefore *must* have been designed?
Why not write an OP then about HSP and your reasons for why they must be designed?
Why do you disagree that HSP could not have evolved? Put your money where your mouth is!
This probably deserves it’s own OP, but I’ll let others decide on that.
First, what is materialism. There seems to be some confusion and the word is constantly conjoined with scare quotes. I wonder which is the cause and which is the effect.
Since the question was raised about what people at UD mean by the term, here’s a link to the Glossary of Terms at UD.
Second, from the OP:
I think Elizabeth is confused. She’s confusing materialism with a different philosophy, the mechanical philosophy. They are not the same, as Cartesian dualism should make clear.
So what is it that makes materialism a basis for prediction, or even a basis for science?
I think we’ve got the cart before the horse.
What is science, and what are the conditions for science? That’s what we should be asking. And then ask whether and how materialism provides those conditions. And then we could also ask why other alternatives do not also provide those conditions.
The only ‘philosophy’ produced in the USA is the ideology of pragmatism.
Johnson, bless his heart, is a born again ideological simpleton. This explains in part why he’s been pushed out of the ‘leadership’ of the IDM. Since then you have a few IDists even suggesting uppercase “Intelligent Design” could have (past tense, as usual) happened ‘naturalistically’.
In a rare case, I agree with Mung here: Elizabeth is confused. Materialism is not ‘intrinsic to scientific methodology’ because it is an ideology, not ‘simply science.’ One can easily ‘do science’ without requiring a commitment to ideological materialism. No one ever accused Elizabeth of being philosophically astute, competent or coherent.
Link: “How many sciences are there?”
Indeed. As Elizabeth has pointed out, Todd Wood, a committed YEC, still manages to do good science. Observation, hypothesis testing and verification of others’ results is a great leveller.
Imaginative use of “parliamentary language”. Incorrect, though. I accuse her of being philosophically astute.
Consider another possibility. It may be that you lack reading comprehension.
Mechanical philosophy? Hobbes, Descartes, Laplace? This is history. Interesting, I’m sure but not so helpful in understanding how the world works.
Observation, hypothesis testing against reality, involves measuring something to produce data. Depending on what you think of as material and immaterial, I’d be interested in how to get immaterial data.
We can think about that while carrying on doing the science. And scientists are not preventing anyone from trying any alternatives that they can come up with. But without data – such as the “Intelligent Designer’s” fingerprints you are stuck at the point of navel-gazing.
PS, if you have time, there are comments here and on down I’d be interested in seeing you reply to.
Living in France, while born & raised good ole USAmerican doesn’t make you exempt from philosophical incoherence, Alan. 😉 But pragmatic, sure.
Does it mean you agree with Elizabeth that ‘materialism’ is “intrinsic to scientific methodology”?!
I’ve accused Elizabeth of being philosophical competent on a few occasions.
In this case, however, I think that Elizabeth has caught herself in a semantic trap by trying to express her own views in the language used by the ID movement. This happens because she’s trying to use their language as a framework for a common ground, and I don’t think that can be done.
Whereas she wants to give a positive spin use the word “materialism”, I would far prefer “empiricism” and even better “epistemological verificationism” (where empirical verifiability is a reliable indicator of matter-of-factual truth and of cognitive significance).
This makes it clear that (a) the priority of science is based on epistemological considerations, not metaphysical ones; (b) the metaphysics follows from the science, and is not prior to it. (There is room for transcendental arguments that ground science, but their role is primarily to eliminate the possibility of skepticism about the external world.)
As what Johnson means by “materialism”, I think that his confusion of physicalism, modernism, and relativism indicates pretty clearly that his concept of “materialism” is far too muddled to do any serious philosophical work. But I also think the entire ID movement depends on this confusion. Once the confusion is dispelled, the ID movement has no coherent position.
Point of information, though a great admirer of Richard Rorty, the nearest I’ve ever been to the US is looking at Goat Island from across the Niagara river. I was born in Birmingham in the good ol’ U of K.
Like everything comes in threes, I think the universe is made up of three sorts of stuff: particles, fields and stuff I don’t know about. Material, for me, is stuff we can detect, no matter how indirectly. That’s why I like to think in terms of real and imaginary, rather than material / immaterial or natural / supernatural.
Do you have a different definition of “material”?
Ah, but here’s the point!
On the one hand, it is certainly right to stress the procedures of testing hypotheses against measurements as central to the epistemological priority of science. On the other hand, there is no reason to insist that what is measured must consist of fundamental particles or be explained entirely in terms of fundamental particles. And yet that is what Johnson clearly means by “materialism”: a metaphysical commitment (not an epistemological one) which has had (he claims) pernicious consequences for morality and culture.
Think of it this way: the empirical sciences of economics and sociology don’t depend on our ability to explain markets or revolutions in terms of physics. (Heck, we can’t even reduce chemistry to physics!) What counts is measurability, not reducibility! So why should we allow our critics to tar us with the brush of insisting on reducibility, when measurability is what we’re really talking about?
Alan Fox — you live in Paris, yes? I’ve been in Paris for the past four days. If I’d recalled this fact sooner I would have attempted to meet up with you. Alas, I’m leaving in two hours for Rome. If you’d like to meet at some point I can let you know the next time I’m in Paris.
Kantian Naturalist,
Violent agreement here. Measurability good, Reducibility bad.
Kantian Naturalist,
Unfortunately, Paris is a ten hour TGV ride or maybe twelve by car. The airport nearest me is Carcassonne but Toulouse is only an hour’s drive. You’d be very welcome here. Mrs Fox is an excellent cook. (She sometimes reads this blog 🙂 )
Unfortunately, the weather isn’t too good at the moment. We have a raging calm with 32°C highs and constant sunshine.
Yes, I see that Rome will be similarly depressing.
Kantian Naturalist,
A visit to Rome is on my wishlist!
Getting back on topic . . .
With the distinction clear between measurability and reducibility, and the further clarification that when Johnson is talking about “materialism”, he is talking about reducibility (and I think that’s pretty obvious, yes?), then those of us who are interested on focusing on measurability should perhaps not use the term “materialism” when advertising our own views.
It is true, however, that to be measurable, there has to be some ‘resistance’, or some way that the stuff (or things) being measured can ‘push back’ against our instruments, frustrate us, surprise us. That would certainly seem to involve some kind of “materiality”. But it needn’t be the case that something is reducible to quantum fields (or whatever) in order to offer us that kind of resistance! That is, markets and revolutions might have their own kind of “materiality” regardless of however the sciences are organized.
(As an aside: one of the major platforms of the Vienna Circle, aka logical positivism, aka logical empiricism, was the Unity of Science thesis: the idea that all of the sciences could be hierarchically organized and unified. Physics at the bottom, then chemistry, then biology, then psychology, and finally sociology. There are, surprisingly, a few defenders of the Unity of Science today, but several prominent philosophers of science — Nancy Cartwright and John Dupre in particular — reject it.)
Let’s make a wager, KN. I’ll bet that if you promote your preferred “epistemological verificationism” as best & loud as you can for the next 30 years of your life, that still not more than 1 out of 1000 people surveyed in an average USA city or ANY city around the world will know wtf you mean. Will you take that ‘irrelevant philosopher who doesn’t understand why’ wager?
I’m not interested to get sidetracked by your ’empiricist’ ideology either, KN. Or this: “the metaphysics follows from the science”, as if you would fire your entire field of employment from societal relevance (or at least take a bigger & bigger understudy pay cut) just because you’ve personally given up (that’s not a myth?)! And how you so cutely slice & dice metaphysics & epistemology, well, you know a little what I think (or what little I think) of your disenchanted philosophical heroes. 😉
Your “science is the measure of all things” idol is smelly bullshit.
Would you not use the term ‘ideology’, KN, to face this issue more directly?
Yes, of course it does. And on insisting that ‘Darwinism’ is a ‘scientific theory’, e.g. Dembski.That’s why they’ve steadily removed Johnson, while still praising him for starting the ‘movement’ rolling in California 1993.
1) You have not dispelled the confusion with your highfalutin, but ultimately empty ’empiricist’ (or “even better…”) ideology. 2) The IDM ‘operates’ as a ‘big tent’. So they don’t really care which part of that tent you try to persuade of your atheism. There are inevitably ’empiricists’ in the ID camp too! This is what allows such diverse folks as Mung, stcordova and WJM to persist in their uppercase ‘Intelligent Design’ collective USA delusion. 3) Elizabeth is ‘philosophically competent’ according to you?!? She’s flip-flopped between believing & not-believing apparently for most of her adult life. I’m not saying people can’t or don’t doubt. We all do in our own ways. But her quasi-Buddhist, panentheist, wannabe Quaker (while lying about proper capitalisation), yet practically atheist, pomo pomo mixture of science, philosophy and theology/worldview appears to be a mess. This thread, in which she thinks materialism is “intrinsic to scientific methodology” simply shows that confusion/muddle once again more fully.
And that’s not ad-hom, it’s an observation based on social facts displayed at TSZ & UD. I wish her well in eventually sorting it out.
Alan Fox,
Thanks, I’d forgotten that point of information. So, I won’t hold you to being necessarily pragmatic by default then? 😉