I’m also not claiming that science could, or should, be used to describe art or beauty or morality. (To be honest it’s a little insulting that you felt you needed to make that rather obvious point at such length). Science is concerned only with the objective.

“Truth”, “art”, “beauty”, “morality” and the “reasonable judgment” you like to invoke are all, despite your protestations, subjective and will ever remain so.

(Having said that, it’s entirely conceivable to me that human appreciation of a piece of art could be reduced to a particular pattern of neurons firing in the brain. That even explains why it’s different for different people: different genetics and different life experiences lead to different neural pathways, requiring different stimuli to achieve the “appreciation” effect. If that happened, would your whole worldview collapse?)

Morality is simply something we evolved to maintain our communities and better survive in our world.

In response to the other examples you gave: proliferation of nuclear weapons? It’s bad because it makes me and my family less safe. Imbalance of genders in China? It’s bad because many men will be unable to find companionship, leading to human suffering. These are trivial examples. It’s strange to me that you feel you need to invoke some sort of absolute moral standard to justify your opinion of them.

But again we’ve wandered off track. You still haven’t answered my original question: why do you think the position of atheism implies philosophical materialism?

Couldn’t someone be an atheist and not a philosophical materialist?

Of course I’ve implied an alternative account of knowledge in this discussion: we grasp the form of things, I’ve said, in knowing. And, as I’ve implied, the form is causal. But the form is not reducible to the pure data of sensory experience. It requires reasonable judgment, not observation or measurement merely, not inductive inference, merely, to grasp the form and therefore the formal cause of things in the world.

This says something profound not only about physical nature but about the person who knows physical nature. On the one hand, this non-reductive appreciation of form tells us, in accord with our empirical observation, that only the person can do science, and the person is not reducible to the data of science. A region of pure mass/energy cannot do science. A subatomic particle, or a mere collection of them, cannot do science. The person is not just another thing in the world but a being capable of grasping the order of the things of the world. A computer does not grasp the order of the world. Only the person using the computer does.

On the other hand, material causality is not the only cause of things. Otherwise, it would be impossible for us to know anything. The burden of proof is not on me, then, but on the one who would dogmatically invoke science as if observation, measurement, and inference therefrom can prove that observation, measurement, and inference therefrom is the only path to knowledge. The presumption implicit in this limitation of knowledge is that material causality is the only realiy.

And you have indeed limited a priori reality and knowledge in our discussion to the material plane, however you may deny it. How? You will not give me anything concrete about the character of the entities that science deals with, because you want to assert that your thinking is not laden with a priori assumptions, so I’ll have to recover some ground in our discussion to show this.

Recall that you limited reality to the nature that is discoverable by science or that has been discovered by science. You said that you have no reason to assume that science will ever prove that there is anything in existence that is “supernatural.” Of course, you are quite right about that. Science cannot prove the existence of the supernatural because science only concerns itself with material causality. But why should we think that the only knowledge available to man exists entirely on the material plane that science deals with? Indeed, as I’ve implied, this is itself a repudiation of the special character of human knowledge. By next invoking the principle, that you have not since eschewed, that the only type of proof that we have access to is via observation, measurement and inference therefrom (a rather crude concept of the nature of modern science, by the way), that only this type of investigative procedure “works,” and that nothing else does, especially philosophy, you have further shown your assumption of the premise that only material causality is real.

And, by the way, you have made your argument on an entirely philosophical level, without proving it by observation, measurement, and inference therefrom.

As for your utilitarian argument, of course science can be made to work in a utilitarian way. It can be made to give us new and better technology. But technology is not a good in and of itself. You have to prove on another level that the technological pursuits that drive “Big Science” are in fact to the benefit of humanity. Some of them are, or may be (penicillin, air-conditioning, etc.). And some of them are not, or may not be (atomic weaponry, bioengineered viruses used as weapons of mass destruction, technological gadgets whose only value lies in increasing the modern consumerist urge).

Science cannot tell us if the technology it produces is good or bad. What scientific experiment can you devise that would tell us whether or not it is good to sterilize the poor through innovative new chemical sterilization procedures? Many scientists in the early twentieth century in America thought this would be a good thing. Many scientists today think that it is good to use genetic engineering to screen children in the womb. This sort of screening has led to the mass abortion of female children in China. Can measurement, observation, and inference therefrom tell us whether it is a good thing for a Chinese couple to abort their female child because they are allowed to have only one child?

Again, on your account, only observation, measurement,and inference therefrom can give us the truth about nature. If you did not think this, you would not conclude that there is probably no supernatural. After all, the only investigative procedure that works, you say, has not and probably will not discover it. You claim that there is no a priori assertion in this. Clearly, though, there is (the a prior assumption, namely, that material causality is the only causal agency in nature: this has to be assumed by you because this is really all that science can possibly discover, except for the aspect of the form of things that corresponds to mathematical description).

Your procedure cannot, a priori, tell me anything about the supernatural. But it also cannot tell me anything about the human good or about beauty. Your procedure cannot tell me, for instance, whether it is good that China is raising a population of children that is disproportionately male in its composition. Your procedure cannot tell me whether it is good or not that we should produce a sheep-human hybrid clone. Your procedure cannot tell me whether it is good or not that a country should stockpile nuclear weapons in order to deter military competition from foreign powers.

Your investigative procedure can also not tell me if a particular artwork or style of art is beautiful. Are we left, then, in a state of being unable to reason about these things, about the human good, or about the beautiful?

My vision of knowledge, in recognizing the formal differentiation and causality of things in nature, allows for the possibility for discussing in a rational manner the human good or the beautiful. I don’t have to assume that beauty is only a subjective impression, or that the good is just what a culture thinks at a particular time, because I don’t a priori reduce reality to what science is capable of discovering. Thus, I can legitimately stand in the tradition of moral discourse stemming from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and can enter into discourse about whether, say, a Roger Maplethorpe photograph of sadomasochism has objective artistic value, or whether or not it is good that nuclear weaponry is proliferating into the Middle East. I can say, in consistency with the principle of knowledge that I adopt, that discourse about these sorts of things can be objective and true and not just opinion. I don’t have to rely on scientific observation or mathematical calculation in order to reason about things of politics, or ethics, or art. I can see that philosophy has a value that works, on its own level, irreducible to scientific investigation. Everything has its own irreducible form, and science does not deal with form (except, again, on the barest mathematical level), only philosophy does that.

And, as an added benefit of my account of knowledge, I can reason about the supernatural, whether it exists or not, without having to rely upon a methodological procedure that cannot even possibly discover its existence: just as the scientific method cannot discover the good or the beautiful.

One who restricts himself to the scientific method cannot reason about the good and the beautiful, and places us in the midst of the postmodern dilemma, and the postmodern thinkers (Heidegger, Derrida, Foucalt, and Lyotard) are much more prescient than the Anglophone thinkers, so ignorant of history and of human value, such as Dawkins and Dennet, because the postmodernists openly and consistently follow the logic of their materialist position to its ultimate conclusion of nihilism. It is, in fact, quite “easy,” as you say disparagingly, to place scientific materialism in a postmodern context, because nihilism is precisely the outcome of scientific materialism.

And your assertion to the effect that science just happens, that some other Galileo will inevitably just come along, seems to stem from an ignorance of the history of the thing. In the vsst expanse of human history modern science is only 500 years old, constricted to a small geographical origin, and took the cultural advent of the Christian Platonism represented in such figures as Copernicus and Galileo to bring it about. Most human cultures just assumed that the reality of physical nature was too mysterious and arbitrary to even try to understand it in mathematical or scientific terms. Again, science is not an inevitable by-product of material processes but a human accomplishment. Certain, perhaps unrepeatable, cultural conditions and assumptions had to exist before the modern scientific method could take hold.

And, really, all that I have said in this most recent comment is subsidiary to my main point in these posts: given the assumption of philosophical materialism (implicit in the assumption that only science can tell us what is, because science only discovers material realities), all human knowledge is invalidated, including scientific knowledge.

Reality, in other words, must be more and greater than what science can discover in order for science to take place and to work.

When you talk about exploitation using the fruits of science, that’s not actually science. That’s politics. It’s greed and misuse of knowledge. I could point to any number of similar atrocities committed directly in the name of religion, but it’s a bit early in the discussion to be invoking Godwin’s Law.

Besides, it has no bearing whatsoever on the truth or otherwise of scientific endeavour. The invention of the atomic bomb didn’t invalidate the work of Einstein. If it did, your GPS unit wouldn’t work.

As for art: on a purely functional level, we have the production of paint and ink, the printing press and digital technology which has allowed dissemination of art to the masses. At an artistic level we have the sense of awe and wonder at appreciating the beauty of the natural world, from the smallest atoms to the largest galaxies and everything in between, which has inspired poets and artists from Da Vinci on down.

Regarding your question about:

“… how observation, measurement and inference therefrom can prove that knowledge is reducible to observation, measurement and inference therefrom.”

… the answer is the same as that previously provided. To quote my earlier comment: “If I were claiming science to be the source of some transcendent meaning then that might be a valid question, but I’m not making that claim. I’m merely saying that, based on years of experience, science is the best method we have for determining and understanding the forces that drive natural phenomena.”

In answer to your specific point, I’m also not claiming that science is the only valid source of knowledge. I’m saying that science has proven itself objectively reliable over and over again. If you’re offering an alternative source of knowledge, particularly if it contradicts any results arising from science, then the burden of proof is on you to show that your method has similar or better objective results. Can you do that?

I know it’s easy to throw post-modernist arguments at science and say it all may be a figment, but in that case philosophy itself is no more useful. But it’s irrelevant anyway. There is an objective reality in science.

We could forget everything we know about science today, but eventually someone would re-invent the telescope and come to the same conclusions as Galileo.

You can’t make the same argument about any given philosophy, and you certainly can’t make the same argument about any given religion.

Regarding the second question, I am not asking how we can use science to prove science. I am asking how observation, measurement and inference therefrom can prove that knowledge is reducible to observation, measurement and inference therefrom. These are distinct questions. If you cannot prove that the only valid knowledge that can be gotten is through the restrictive method that you advocate then I don’t see why anyone should think it wise to follow you in this regard.

Regarding your point that you are not saying that science provides a transcendent meaning: you are in fact saying that science gives us information. What is the nature of this information? Is it simply a subjective phenomenon? If not, then you are in fact saying that science gives us access to “transcendent meaning.” That is, it gives us access to “entities” that are not simply mental constructs. Otherwise, this information could not be “useful.” It would simply be a fiction of our cultural imagination. And if it is simply a fiction of our cultural imagination (which is actually what postmodernists believe) then there is no reason why, in a different cultural context, we might not in the future choose to do away with science in favor of other “useful” fictions. Science has to validate itself philosophically. The culture may grow tired of it at some point(which has already happened in many quarters). If the culture grows tired of it, science, especially “Big Science,” will no longer be pursued. Science is not self-perpetuating. It requires a cultural commitment to it in order to be continued. But science itself cannot provide the justification for this commitment. Only philosophy can do that.

So, then, what is the positive character of this information that science gives us?

I think what you mean by your second question is how can we use science to prove science. The answer here is similar to the answer to the first question. If I were claiming science to be the source of some transcendent meaning then that might be a valid question, but I’m not making that claim. I’m merely saying that, based on years of experiece, science is the best method we have for determining and understanding the forces that drive natural phenomena.

Prescinding, then, from the question of what Richard Dawkins may or may not think, let’s just stick for a second or two to what you may or may not think.

Please clarify for me:
What do you mean by “supernatural”? How is this “possible” realm different from the “natural”? What does it mean, then, to speak of a “natural” realm?

Until I get clearer what you mean by this I cannot understand or respond to your proposed alternative to atheistic philosophical materialism.

My question was why atheism necessarioly implies philosophical amterialism. I maintain that one can be an atheist without being a philosophical materialist.

For example, suppose I accept the possibility that there is a supernatural realm. I can then (without contradiction) accept the logical underpinnings of science and note that in this theoretical supernatural realm, the scientific method would not be applicable.

However, I see no evidence that this supernatural realm intersects with our own at all, and I consider all the claims that they do (whether they be religious dogma or new-age metaphysical “energy” claims) to be unsubstantiated nonsense.

Formal causality and final causality in nature are not supernatural realities. They are “supersensual,” which means that they exist in nature but that one cannot come to know their existence by a brute and crude “taking a look” at the world or by pure experience. One comes to know them (as one comes to know anything) by intelligent judgment of one’s experience, not simply by “awareness” (whatever that could mean in a materialist context) of the brute chain of material realities striking and beating one’s sensory organs. This is what Hume understood so well, and the best Anglophone philosophers who followed him, such as Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, each of whom recognized that materialism, with its concomitant reduction of human experience to the flow of sensations, is problematic for human knowledge, including scientific knowledge. They each knew this, but they refused to reject their materialist premises.

Formal causality is necessary to all scientific knowledge, even knowledge of genes and their causal influence. This is true even though science is historically predicated upon the rejection of formal causality. Form just is intelligibility. Formal causality is the exerting of the intelligible structure of physical realities on their very existence. Intelligibility is not simply a feature of the process of sensory data abstractly conceived, and this is what Hume understood so well.

Take for instance mathematics, which, as it has become cliche to assert, is “the language of science.” Mathematical formulations are not purely material or sensual realities. In physical science, one’s mathematical formulas or descriptions must correspond to the data of sensory experience if one is to have a sound understanding of things. But the formulas and their meanings do not exist merely on the sensory or material plane. A mathematical formula may describe material and sensory processes, but it is not reducible to these processes. It cannot be captured in the flow of spatio-temporal realities. It has universal meaning, transcending paricular moments of time, or places in nature, or human cultures. What type of reality is a mathematical formula then?

Mathematics captures part of the form of things, not the matter or the sensory dimension. Mathematics itself is based upon even more basic laws of reason: logical laws, such as the principle of non-contradiction. Everything that science does (and everything that Richard Dawkins says, by the way) is based upon this principle. Where does this principle exist? It is not a physical reality. It is not a subatomic particle, or an energy field. It has no mass, velocity, shape, size, weight, etc., except when it is enunciated as a proposition. But the principle is not reducible to the proposition that enunciates it. Is it a purely mental construct? If so, the postmodernists are right and all human discourse, including the discourse of Richard Dawkins, is reduced to meaninglessness.

There must be, alternatively to materialist or psychological explanations of logical laws such as the principle of non-contradiction, a different kind of explanation. Purely physical process cannot encompass the understandability of these laws. Physical processes are spatio-temporally confined and these laws are universal. There is an intelligibility to things in the world that we come to know through our intellectual judgments. There is more than a simply material actuality to them. We must be able to grasp this intelligibility. If not, we could not discourse with one another or do science. There is a realm of meaning, of understandability. Understandability is not reducible to physical qualities such as mass, velocity, and figure.

Can a purely material science explain how we instinctively operate by the principle of non-contradiction? Not without delegitimating itself. It can try to explain the principle of non-contradiction on the basis of neuroscience. But, then, the very chain of reasoning that is exemplified in the demonstration would itself be simply a structure of the brain and not an explanation. The principle of non-contradiction is implied in the very demonstration, the very foundation on which the demonstration exists. If the principle is simply a neural process or neural structure, then there is no convincing reason in the demonstration. There is simply brute assertion, the bumbing into one another of consecutive material impressions and sensations. There would be no point, then, in reasoning with one another. Demonstration would be futile because there would only be material processes randomly evolving and no coherent intelligibility to them that we could discern and make judgments about. Some people would be neurally configured to “understand” this (whatever it might mean to “understand” in a materialist context), and others wouldn’t be so configured. The only way that we could “teach” these others is to reconfigure their brains. It might be best, in fact, to kill them. Such an ethos fed eugenicism and modern genocide. I suspect that such an ethos exists in Daniel Dennett’s reduction of humanity into two groups: the “brights” and the “not-brights.” He has given up reason altogether in his putative demonstrations. He has reduced human discourse to the exertion of power.

I’m going to do a series of posts on formal causality, spelling out what the expression means, so I don’t want to go into it much more at this point.

I do wish to point out though that Dawkins most certainly does imply causality throughout his writings: material causality only. He describes genes as causal: indeed, he even seems at points to confuse the causality of genes with ultimate reductive explanation, though he’s smart enough to realize, I’m sure, in the full context of his writings, that the theoretical physicist and not the biologist has the last word on things in the hierarchy of science as currently construed.

And of course, to address your most recent point, Dawkins denies that evolution is directed. But my point is that he slips up all the time in his language and use of metaphors in describing the causal action of genes.