Survival of the Sickest, Why We Need Disease

_{Salvador Cordova

April 27, 2009

Darwinism, Intelligent Design}

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“It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!”

This is a phrase a software engineer will use to jokingly confess his software has a defect.

When Sharon Moalem wrote the NY Times Bestseller, Survival of the Sickest: Why We Need Disease, he probably did not intend to make a joking confession of flaws in Darwin’s theory, but he succeed in doing so.

Recall the words of Darwin:

Natural Selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good.

C.DARWIN sixth edition Origin of Species — Ch#4 Natural Selection

If Darwin’s claim is true, why then are we confronted with numerous, persistent, hereditary diseases?

Can it be that Darwin was wrong? The obvious answer is yes. But in the face of an obvious flaw in Darwin’s ideas, Moalem argues that what appears to be a flaw in Darwin’s theory is actually an ingenious feature! Moalem extols the virtues of disease, and since disease is virtuous, natural selection will favor it.

It is accepted that sickle-cell anemia persists because of natural selection, but what about other diseases? Moalem explores many other diseases like diabetes, hemochromatosis, high cholesterol, early aging, favism, obesity, PANDAS, CCR5-delta32, xenophobia, etc. showing how natural selection incorporated these “virtuous” diseases into our species.

Moalem is not alone in arguing that natural selection creates through the process of destruction. For example, Allen Orr suggests that natural selection is the cause of blindness in Gammarus minus. In the world of Darwin, what happened to Gammarus minus isn’t the loss of vision, it is the creation of blindness. And since selection favors blindness in Gammarus minus, blindness is a functional improvement! Once again, Darwinism is immune to any testability through the process of constantly redefining what is considered “good”.

The net result is that Moalem’s book becomes an unwitting critique of Darwinian evolution. It highlights numerous empirical examples of how natural selection actually goes against Darwinian ideas of constant progress, and instead demonstrates how natural selection can be an agent of demise.

Comments

Mr Fox: It seems, regrettably, you have not followed the case of the imposition of methodological naturalism in recent decades closely enough. As Mr Lewontin documents and as the US NAS et al have now sought to impose up to the level of career busting and forcing eduction policy [not to mention Journal editorial policy . . . ], MN is being imposed as a censoring rule on science. And that, in a context where if it were not so imposed, there would be excellent reason to see that the evidence of -- say -- the data structures and contents of DNA, with associated codes and implementing mechanisms are strong indicators of design. (Have you got handy cases of algorithm-implementing, coded data storing, flexibly programmed entities that are known per observation to have resulted from chance plus mechanical forces? I would think that there is a large number of instances showing that computers routinely originate by design, and that there are no known exceptions; with an excellent statistical, search resource exhaustion reason why that is so.) GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{April 30, 2009
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How does Professor Delfino propose that scientists should study the supernatural, which, by definition, is invisible to the scientific method?Alan Fox_{April 30, 2009
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PS: This will also repay a read.kairosfocus_{April 30, 2009
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Though I am flattered that you address a comment to me, Mr. M, I doubt I have the stamina to respond in detail. You mention censorship. There are several former posters, more articulate and better-informed than me, who are prevented from commenting here notwithstanding the new, improved moderation policy. To me the issue is simple, neither you, I nor anyone else is limited in thinking what they like about ultimate causes, and science does not have the tools to examine ultimate causes. Philosophy encompasses science, science does not encompass philosophy.
...scientific work may not use empirical evidence that would otherwise warrant a design inference to so infer.
Rubbish! Any evidence that is amenable to scientific study (i. e. capable of being detected, observed, directly or indirectly, measured)can be looked at. Any real phenomenon is available for scientific scrutiny and analysis. Give me an example of evidence (that is visible to the scientific method) that is barred from scientific study.Alan Fox_{April 30, 2009
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Mr Fox: That science is in the main about the exploration of the regularities of nature is not the same as that it cannot infer to design per empirical data, as a factor of explanation in the empirical world. Methodological naturalism imposes a distorting, censoring rule that entails that where it is inconvenient to materialism [a particular worldview], scientific work may not use empirical evidence that would otherwise warrant a design inference to so infer. That is censorship not science, and it is very different from how the founders of modern science have thought. "Reinterpretations" of Buridan et al notwithstanding. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{April 30, 2009
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Also: I think we would profit from a reading of Plantinga's discussion here. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{April 30, 2009
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@ StephenB A forrmer poster Keiths/ribczynski points out elsewhere that you have had this discussion before with him.
In his book Science and the Study of God, p. 79, Alan Padgett quotes Jean Buridan:
Natural philosophers like Roger Bacon (ca. 1220-1292) and Jean Buridan (ca. 1292-1358) examined the secondary causes by which God upheld the common course of nature. Buridan wrote, for example, that “in natural philosophy we ought to accept actions and dependencies as if they always proceed in a natural way.”
That’s practically a textbook definition of methodological naturalism. Padgett adds:
We should note, however, that Buridan was devoutly Christian and that his natural philosophy was framed within a Christian worldview. After the quotation just given, for example, Buridan goes on to state, “Nevertheless God is the cause of this world.”
So Buridan is a perfect example of how one can embrace methodological naturalism without being a philosophical naturalist.
LinkAlan Fox_{April 30, 2009
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Gentle Folks: Sometimes, it is necessary to remind ourselves of what the informed consensus on science and its methods was only "yesterday":
science: a branch of knowledge conducted on objective principles involving the systematized observation of and experiment with phenomena, esp. concerned with the material and functions of the physical universe. [Concise Oxford, 1990] scientific method: principles and procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge [”the body of truth, information and principles acquired by mankind”] involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses. [Webster's 7th Collegiate, 1965]
For, science at its best is the unfettered (but ethically and intellectually responsible) pursuit of the truth about our world based on empirical evidence, and theorising, analysis and discussion constrained by that evidence, towards building up a growing body of open-ended knowledge of our world. And, discovery of such knowledge may occur in a "pure" or "applied" context. [For instance, Edison -- on exploring the physics of the light bulb -- discovered a form of the photoelectric effect; and, patented it. (Typical . . . )] On that premise, methods and rules of inquiry are warranted based on their ability to contribute to the success of that programme of inquiry. Inference to best empirically anchored explanation passes that test. Logic passes that test. Statistical techniques pass that est. Probability based reasoning passes that test. For that matter, the explanatory filter used by design theorists passes the test:
(i) chance, necessity and design are all empirically warranted causal forces, (ii) they have characteristic manifestations, (iii) we can cluster them based on an analysis of factors and aspects of phenomena (iv) on seeing the disjunction between regularity and high contingency we can identify law-like mechanical necessity, (v) on seeing high but stochastic contingency we can identify chance based causal factors (v) on seeing high contingency that fulfills functionality joined to complexity we can identify a strong association with design per a massive database of observed cases,a nd a statistical rationale as to why chance is unlikely to get to islands of function on the available search resources.
In fact, such techniques are extensions of well known statistical and forensic approaches that are routinely used to make momentous decisions and just as routinely understood to be applications of the scientific approach. For excellent reason. But, in certain cases, the design inference runs across a strongly institutionalised worldview's preferred origtins story, one that is well described by Mr Richard Lewontin:
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
So, the issue is not whether science is primarily about exploration of chance and mechanical forces, over the past several centuries. [For, it has equally been applied to detection of design for the past 150 years, and has routinely been used to make very serious decisions indeed.] The real issue is as Stephen B has raised: the imposition of a worldview by institutional power and associated censorship and career busting, backed up by propagandising of science education and public policy debates. Sorry if such sounds harsh, but it is unfortunately a well warranted description of what has been done, and done on the record. This has to stop, and it has to stop now. Or we will pay a terrible price as a civlisation for our folly. For, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. GEM of TKI PS: I strongly suggest a careful reading of Newton's general Scholium to his Principia, for those who imagine that methodological naturalism was the dominant view of science in the past. PPS: Mr Lewontin goes on to reveal his ignorance of theistic thought, showing just how deep the gap is on the required knowledge base fort understanding the true history of modern science. For, the belief in the Judaeo-Christian God as exemplified by Newton, Pascal, and up tot he likes of Faraday, Maxwell and Kelvin etc, is marked by the understanding that God is a God of order not chaos, so we have reason to expect that there will be an intelligible general order to the operations of the cosmos. And indeed even chance follows laws -- statistical distributions. Further to this, miracles are NOT chaotic: for a miracle to stand out as a sign, it must be in a context of an orderly and predictable pattern to nature, so it must be inherently rare, pointing to the imposition f a higher order on the usual course. Also, in a world of accountable moral choice, such only is possible when actions have predictable consequences as a rule. So, the notion that the Judaeo- Christian frame of the founding scientists was chaotic is a strawman distortion fed by -- at best -- disqualifying ignorance.kairosfocus_{April 30, 2009
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Allen, "Questions about the origin of life (like the origin of the universe, and time, and natural laws, and so forth) are probably beyond the scope of the empirical method, and may remain forever unanswered." Exactly right, especially the "natural laws," which was what I was trying to illustrate, in part, with the quote from Chesterton. The natural repetitions, which I think is more accurate than calling them "laws," are like first principles, in a way. You have to assume them from the outset, and work forward. They do not have prior premises, and by "premises" I mean any "reason behind" the repetitions where we can see or understand the "chain of reasoning" leading up to them that makes them what they are. We cannot see it, even if the chain of reasoning existed, we have no insight into it. Does this make sense? We can see what just has to be assumed, and what we can otherwise infer, natural repetitions just has to be assumed. The idea that we van ever reason within them and see their inner synthesis like we can real laws, such as laws of logic, is just false, because we have no power of inference between the repetitions like we do between the laws of logic. Now I understand that this is an obscure way of looking at what we call laws of nature, but it is important to understand and remember, for it maintains the arbitrariness, in principle, that seems to be the case with the weird repetitions, and the following inference that something intended them, and if nothing else to awaken someone out of the spell of scientism and put things into the proper perspective.Clive Hayden_{April 30, 2009
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----Sal: "To undstand the technique of “proof by contradiction” I understand the principle. My question was rhetorical.StephenB_{April 29, 2009
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If meth-nat is accepted as a standard, we would have to specifically reject the possibility that God might have designed life for ID to be considered a science, rather than to leave it as an unanswered question.
Actually if one accepts philosophical naturalism as true, it leads to an incoherent view of reality. There is a contradiction. If one evolves methodoligical naturalism to be philosophical naturalism, then that will result in a contradiction. But many will stop short of doing that because they know it will lead to contradiction. Mark Perakh of all people saw the futility of trying to argue all causal agencies are natural. If everything is "natural" then the word "natural" will lose any meaning! I think one can invoke miracles as causes of natural phenomena, but in so doing, one will admit it cannot be studied in the lab, since by definition, miracles would not be subject to direct laboratory repeatability. Hence one has a good argument to say miracles can't be a part of empirical science by definition, even if miracles are the fundamental cause of much of the physical universe. Trevors and Abel and others have used "proof by contradiction" to make a persuassive case that the emergence of life on Earth was a very unique event. Imho, miracle is the appropriate description. One can use empirical science to make a circumstantial case that a miracle happened. But to make miracles a part of empirical scence? That's tough sell. I'm not going to try. PS To undstand the technique of "proof by contradiction" See: Proof by Contradictionscordova_{April 29, 2009
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If meth-nat is accepted as a standard, we would have to specifically reject the possibility that God might have designed life for ID to be considered a science, rather than to leave it as an unanswered question.
It is standard practice in mathematics to assume for the sake of argument a hypothesis you actually believe to be untrue in order to prove the argument you believe to be true. This is fundamental to the technique of "proof by contradiction". Some of the most important theorems in math came about by assuming as true the hypothesis that was actually false. But my aim with posing the question about methodological naturalism was less ambitious. Rather than taking sides on the issue, I viewed it as a moot point because, I have specualted, the hypothesis of ID will persist because of teleology in biology. My personal opinion is that the design hypothesis is alive and will persist because God is helping it along. No peer-review committee on Earth can prevail over ID if God is for it. But that is a personal opinion, not a scientific one. My view is that Allen feels ID is outside of empirical science, and prefers to be realtively quiet on the question ultimate causes. Trying to argue if methodological naturalism is good or bad might be a moot point if the scientic enterprise begins to discard it for practical reasons. I sense a slight capitulation in the questions of origin of the universe and the origin of life. Personally, I stay from arguments about whether ID should be part of empirical science or not. That is somewhat the position of Stephen Meyer. The real question is not whether ID should be a part of empirical science, but whether ID is true. I concluded after remotely participating in the debates surround Allen notorious "Evolution and Design Class", that arguing over whether ID should be a part of empirical science will not be of great benefit to the ID community. What I think will benefit the ID community: 1. a serious contribution to the understanding of evolutionary biology. I consider the work by Sandford and the Mendel team potentially in that category. Medical science could be overturned by their findings (if indeed genomic deterioration is as bad as they suppose). 2. Stegonography. The ability to use comparative anatomy and DNA sequencing to uncover "user manuals" in life. I firmly believe God made the Apes and the snails and butteflies for a reason. They are artifacts like the Rosetta stone. Why they have been made will eventually be known. Their purpose is not completely evident, but one day they may be vital to scientific understanding. I decided that philosophical debates were not for me, and to some extent Allen's class in 2006 sort of motivated me to go back to school. I felt he was correct to argue that for ID to succeed, it would do them well to have people working in field research. I decided that I wanted to acquire the skills to at least be an amateur field researcher. My chosen field is physics. PS As a side note, I think it would be better to dialogue with Allen than try to debate. He has decades of knowledge in the area of biology and many other disciplines. I think we can learn a lot from him. Actually, he has introduced a new word I'm completely unfamiliar with: "teleonomic" One may wonder why I feel on such friendly terms with Allen. Recall I study and continue to study in secular schools. Many of my professors despise ID. I had to learn to feel comfortable being instructed by people who totally rejected my ID leanings. Demonization and attempts to humiliate people who disagree with us can be counter productive.scordova_{April 29, 2009
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---Sal: "But, for the sake of argument, let us say methodological naturalism was the norm practiced even by religious scientists." Why would we want to assume something that clearly isn't true?StephenB_{April 29, 2009
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Johannes Kepler’s works on astronomy contained writings about how space and heavenly bodies represent the Christian Trinity. Oops, someone forgot to tell him that methodological naturalism forbids such things. I wonder how it was that he didn’t get the message. Could it be that there was no such message? Good guess. Do we neet more? How many more?StephenB_{April 29, 2009
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(Boyle's) law falls under the umbrella of methodological naturalism: it explains the relationship between things in the material world. That's not what meth-nat is, Hazel. Meth-nat is the requirement that "all causes are empirical and naturalistic — which means they can be measured, quantified and studied methodically" Boyle (or Faraday or Thomson or Planck) would have axiomatically assumed God did it and not worried about a cause in describing the aspect of nature that was their interest.tribune7_{April 29, 2009
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Let me be more explicit about what I mean by "real science": One of Boyle’s laws states that for a certain amount of an ideal gas kept at a fixed temperature, the pressure and the volume are inversely proportional, which can be expressed simply as P•V = k, k a constant. This law falls under the umbrella of methodological naturalism: it explains the relationship between things in the material world. The fact that Boyle was a Christian when he derived this, and that his Christian beliefs motivated him to look for a simple mathematical relationship is not a part of the result itself: Christians and materialists and Hindus and flaming New age hippies can all agree about the law despite the fact that they have different ideas about why such laws might exist. That is the value of methodological naturalism: it provides a common background within which people of all sorts of metaphysical perspectives can work and come to agreement.hazel_{April 29, 2009
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sal: It may very well be the case that God/the intelligent Designer "created life". Darwin himself said as much in the last paragraph of the Origin of Species. He recognized what virtually all evolutionary biologists (indeed, virtually all empirical scientists) recognize: that following the origin of life, the evolution of life on Earth could (and therefore probably did) proceed according to "the fixed laws" of nature acting around and within us. As I have pointed out many times, evolutionary biology assumes that life already exists, and proceeds to explain how it has come to be the way it is now. Questions about the origin of life (like the origin of the universe, and time, and natural laws, and so forth) are probably beyond the scope of the empirical method, and may remain forever unanswered. I can live with that; can you?Allen_MacNeill_{April 29, 2009
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But, for the sake of argument, let us say methodological naturalism was the norm practiced even by religious scientists. Sal, you are asking us to imagine away the sticking point of the problem. If meth-nat is accepted as a standard, we would have to specifically reject the possibility that God might have designed life for ID to be considered a science, rather than to leave it as an unanswered question. And if meth-nat were the standard in the 19th century Pasteur's disproof of spontaneous generation would never have been accepted. If it were the standard in the first half of the 20th century Lemaître's Big Bang idea would have been rejected on semantic grounds.tribune7_{April 29, 2009
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from Stephen at 199:
Boyle believed the orderliness of the universe reflected God’s purposeful design. Did you get that? His belief in a Christian God helped him rescue chemistry from superstition. Does that sound like methodological naturalism to you? Is anyone getting this yet?
Yes, it does sound like methodological naturalism to me. Boyle’s work involved explaining natural phenomena in terms of other natural phenomena - he did not reference God in his explanations. His overlying religious perspective motivated him to believe that the material world is an orderly, investigateable place, and his investigations confirmed that. Other people have different reasons for believing that the material world is an orderly, investigateable place, and they too, like Boyle, have found that treating the material world as such has been successful. But both the theist (Boyle in this case) and someone else with a different perspective come to the same conclusions because they agree that the studying the material world in terms of its constituent parts is highly successful. Boyle practiced methodological naturalism (irrespective of the actual term used). So back to my question: can you show us an example of a religious scientist who advanced and investigated a natural phenomena in terms of some non-natural cause - that is, who didn’t practice methodological naturalism? Note well, and I hope you get this, my question does not have to do with the religious beliefs that motivated their search, but with the actual science they performed, and the type of explanations they offered. Can you give an example of some real science advanced by these religious scientists that did not follow the guideline of methodological naturalism?hazel_{April 29, 2009
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In #200 sal asks a good question:
“Is methodological naturalism being eroded away by the mingling of teleology into biology?”
It is if one assumes that teleology has no place in biology. However, this is manifestly not the case. Biological organisms areteleological entities, and are shot through with anatomical features and physiological processes that have all the hallmarks of teleology. Hence, Francisco Ayala and Ernst Mayr both asserted that teleology is legitimate in biology, but only when it is applied to the development and operation of living organisms. This is because living organisms, like all teleological entities, are constructed and operated according to a "plan" or "design" that precedes their construction and operation. Part of this "design" is encoded in their genomes, and part of it is "impressed upon them" by their ecological circumstances. Furthermore, it is most assuredly possible to investigation this kind of teleology using empirical methods. One can explore the genome to find out what kinds of "designs" are encoded therein, and can study the developmental processes by which such "designs" are realized in the structures and functions of the organism whose characteristics they specify. However, none of the foregoing applies to the processes by which such teleonomic "designs" come into being. These processes are all subsumed under evolutionary biology, and as Ayala, Mayr, and all other evolutionary biologists (including Darwin) have pointed out, teleology is unnecessary in evolutionary explanations of the origins of biological teleonomy. [1] As I have now repeatedly pointed out, there is no contradiction between teleology and biological causation, so long as there is some "natural" medium for the storage and expression of the "designs" that precede (or "pre-exist") the construction and operation of living organisms. The problem comes in when one asserts that the same is true for the evolutionary processes by which the "designs" themselves come into being. Such processes exhibit no signs of being teleological (as far as we can tell). Furthermore, there is no place outside of the genomes and ecosystems in nature for the "designs" for evolution itself to reside. One could argue (and indeed, many ID supporters do argue, that they reside "outside" of nature in the mind of God/the Intelligent Designer. However, they also assert (correctly , in my opinion) that God/the Intelligent Designer cannot be studied via empirical methods, nor can His motives or means of operation be studied either. Ergo, since the role of God/the Intelligent Designer in the origin of biological teleonomy has not been (and probably cannot be) shown to be necessary to evolutionary explanations for the origin of biological teleonomy, evolutionary biologists simply don't mention them. Some go further and deny they exist, but they do so using metaphysics, but not science. [1] Ayala and Mayr, following Monod, Pittendrigh, and Wimsatt, both referred to the "internal" teleology of living organisms by the term "teleonomy", to distinguish it from the "external" form of teleology of Aristotle, Paley and what we would now call ID supporters.Allen_MacNeill_{April 29, 2009
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I see we're having debates about history of science. But, for the sake of argument, let us say methodological naturalism was the norm practiced even by religious scientists. The question I pose: "is methodological naturalism being eroded away by the mingling of teleology into biology?" I echo Raff's idea, that the machnine metaphors used by biologists are helping ID proponents and creationists. The subjectivism in engineering is now being imported into biology, and this is making the ground fertile for consideration of ultimate and supernatural causes, or at the very least, causes that are outside the reach of empirical science. Is that a fair statement? PS I certainly think that religious impulse was vital to inspiring science. That was the thesis by Alfren North Whitehead. One can argue that the idea of miracles is most meaningful when they are the exception rather than the rule, thus operationally speaking many scientific theories will presume "natural" (as in ordinary causes), even by religious scientists. But when we are dealing with origins (of life and the universe), it seems we are dealing with causes that are inaccessible to direct empirical inquiry. If the origin of the universe and life were singular events, then by definition they are not natural. It doesn't formally mean "God did it", but on the otherhand it seems rather futile to argue the events were natural in the sense that they were ordinary. My personal educated guess is that God did it. It seems that an intelligence far beyond anything we know created life. If life did not look like it had many machines within it, I'd probably be an atheist.scordova_{April 29, 2009
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-----Allen: "You seem completely unable to recognize the difference between the term “methodological naturalism” and the concept to which it is applied. The former has been in common use since the 1980s, but it is the general consensus of virtually all reputable historians of science (including Ned Burtt, Paul Feyerabend, Carl Hempel, Thomas Kuhn, Imré Lakatos, and Karl Popper, not to mention Ludwig Wittgenstein) that “methodological naturalism” has, in fact, been a basic assumption of almost all empirical scientists and “natural philosophers” since the origin of western philosophy in Ionia in the 7th century BC." I think that we need to take a break and cool down a bit. In any case, your assessment is not correct. It was the starting point of investigation, but it was not the end point. There was no rule as is evident that all the geniuses would have broken it. It might just be easier to just refute your arguments with example after example. Do you think Michael Faraday practiced methodogcal naturalism when he sucessfully concluided that God's unity informed the universe and effected the "unity of electricity?" Let's move on. Robert Boyle believed that, as a Christian, it was part of his service to seek God's purposes in nature. It was in his important work, Skeptical Chemist, that he advanced chemistry from the world of alchemy into the realm of science. Boyle believed the orderliness of the universe reflected God's purposeful design. Did you get that? His belief in a Christian God helped him rescue chemistry from superstition. Does that sound like methodological naturalism to you? Is anyone getting this yet?StephenB_{April 29, 2009
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BTW, stephenB, in your exhaustive research into the history and philosophy of science, did you happen to read Karl Popper's two-volume masterwork, The Open Society and Its Enemies, and if you did, which side did you find more congenial? Just curious...Allen_MacNeill_{April 29, 2009
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Michael Faraday’s religious belief in a single Creator [God's unity], for example, encouraged his scientific belief in the “unity of forces.” What that means is that that magnetism, electricity and the other kinds of forces would have had a common origin. I could provide dozens of similar stories. Doesn’t anyone care about facts anymore, or is everything about idealolgy at all costs? Good grief!
The fact that scientists then, and now, have religious beliefs about why the world is orderly, and are thus motivated to look for that order, is a different matter entirely then including religious concepts in those explanations. Faraday’s religious beliefs were a motivation, but he practiced science as we understand it today - explaining natural things with natural explanations, invoking measurable and testable concepts. God to him and others was the creator and sustainer of the universe - the ultimate cause - but the proximate causes he studied and invoked are entirely contained in the material world without reference to any direct involvement in God. He practiced methodological naturalism as a theist. Perfectly reasonable thing to do and done every day by thousands of religious scientists.hazel_{April 29, 2009
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----Hazel: "Doesn’t it tell us something important that not a single one of them ever seriously advanced, much less found, an explanation involving other than natural causes?" No. It doesn't tell us anything at all. Michael Faraday's religious belief in a single Creator [God's unity], for example, encouraged his scientific belief in the “unity of forces." What that means is that that magnetism, electricity and the other kinds of forces would have had a common origin. I could provide dozens of similar stories. Doesn't anyone care about facts anymore, or is everything about idealolgy at all costs? Good grief!StephenB_{April 29, 2009
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---Allen: "If you had turned this in as an essay in an introductory history of philosophy ......blah, blah, blah. Are you cuckoo! I am not writing essays, I am correcting Darwinist fanstasies, and, I am sorry to say, calculated distortions. In any case, I would not subject myself to a classroom environment to one who has less formal education than I do. So, you can get off that high horse. You are not in a position to weigh anyone's arguments, because you are not sufficiently informed on the matter. Even your guy admits I am right. From Ron Numbers, who is your main source and the one who pushes MN back as far as he can get away with, said this to Paul Nelson [Ron numbers, methodological naturalism, and the rules of baseball] “If you're going to have a game, he continued, you've got to have some rules. For a long time now -- really from the middle of the 19th century -- one of the rules in science has been that the hypothesis of supernatural design is excluded from scientific discourse as a candidate explanation. Just as in baseball, where the first and third base lines define the field of play, in science one of the defining rules has been that the hypothesis of design, although quite possible, falls wholly outside the lines of admissible discourse.” So, this is the most radical view from any historian and it comes from the one most likely to push it back to the earliest date that he thinks he can get away with. Even by his biased, anti-ID standard, he confesses that Methodological naturalism does not predate the mid-nineteenth century. Even at that, it is clear that such a “rule” was not enforced, so you have no case. All these attempts to attribute MN to ancient Greece, the middle ages, or even at the time of Francis Bacon, are obviously made up for the purpose of providing historical cover for an arbitrary rule that really has no history at all. Even with your guy pushing it all the way back as far as he can, you have no case. As I pointed out much earlier, it all began with Darwinian ideology and started festering from that point. About 1980, it finally occurred to someone to use it as a tool for oppression and then rewrite history to cover it up. Give it up. Googling will not help you because you have no place else to go. By the way, are you clear now on the relationship between metaphysics and science? I haven’t heard from you on that one for a while. If someone came to one of my classes and told me that metaphysics has nothing to do with science, I wouldn't just flunk him, I would sent him to detention.StephenB_{April 29, 2009
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Allen (184): Fantastic comment. Methodological naturalism was part of my indoctrination in experimental psychology, back in the Seventies, though no one called it that. I remember exclaiming "What a fine way to put it!" when I first saw the term. Are biology undergrads at Cornell required to get an introduction to the philosophy of science? If so, what do they read?Sal Gal_{April 29, 2009
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Two quotes from 188:
Everyone knows that early scientists began to distinguish “superstition” from “natural causes,” but that doesn’t mean that they established an institutional rule to forbid anything else.
and
So, if you find an ancient scientist who says that he has “no need for that hypothesis,” [God] he is saying that he prefers to explore naturalistic explanations as the default explanation as we all do.
So let’s assume that all the great religious scientists since, say, Galileo, accepted the above two statements. Doesn’t it tell us something important that not a single one of them ever seriously advanced, much less found, an explanation involving other than natural causes? If they were open to the possibility of finding explanations involving other than natural causes, then why didn’t they find any? Perhaps it’s because that approach doesn’t work, and looking for explanations involving natural causes does. And if that’s the case, maybe it’s reasonable to generalize from their experience and adopt the limitation of science as looking for natural causes as a “working ground rule” of science. If all those great scientists who were not against explanations involving non-natural causes never actually found any such explanations, then it seems reasonable to me that we should learn from their experience, and stick with what has worked.hazel_{April 29, 2009
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Methodological naturalism is a RULE which forbids any scientist to consider anything other than natural causes. There has never been any such rule until the 1980’s.
Well, to quote that pirate captain in Pirates of the Caribbean, it’s not so much of a rule as it is a guideline. Searching for natural causes has been successful, and searching for other types have causes has not, so scientists go with what works. If someone could show how to look for, and test, something other than natural causes in a way that led to a increase in fruitful knowledge, then at least slowly that procedure and those causes would become adopted. But such attempts have failed to impress the world of science, not because they break a rule, but because they don’t successfully tell us anything that we can explore and test about the world.hazel_{April 29, 2009
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Allen, you are hilarious. Don’t you know that I have debated others on this subject and all of them go to that same website to copy those same references? In any case, the fact that many philosophers and scientists, including pre-Socratics preferred to study nature without reference to God is well-known and not very hard to explain. Atheists don’t generally go looking for God-like explanations. So, the point is completely irrelevant to the discussion. It is also known that Plato, Aristotle and others began to emphasize teleology and the advance of reason began. More to the point, your extended discussion in cyberspace was totally wasted since you ignored the main distinction. Here it is again, and I ask you to please pay special heed. Methodological naturalism is a RULE which forbids any scientist to consider anything other than natural causes. There has never been any such rule until the 1980’s. Also, your expansive comments about medieval scholastic thinkers was improperly framed. Everyone knows that early scientists began to distinguish “superstition” from “natural causes,” but that doesn’t mean that they established an institutional rule to forbid anything else. This is a serious logical error that fails to account for the two extreme positions and the one common sense position: Extreme [A] = Radical “Union” of science and religion [anti-intellectual superstition] Extreme [B] = Radical “Separation” of science and religion [anti-intellectual secularism] The ideal [C] = Moderate “Intersection” of religion and science. [free and responsible intellectual inquiry] You labor under the illusion that [A] and [B] are the only two alternatives, so you choose [B] without acknowledging the existence of [C] By the way, here is telling paragraph from your references that you seem to have glossed over: “Although characteristically leaving the door open for the possibility of direct divine intervention, they frequently expressed contempt for soft-minded contemporaries who invoked miracles rather than searching for natural explanations.” Even this Darwinist, whoever he is, admits that scientists “left the door open.” So, clearly, methodological naturalism was not being practiced because, as one of your guys defined the term, “We can’t allow a Divine foot in the door.” That is what methodological naturalism is. Are we clear yet? So, if you find an ancient scientist who says that he has “no need for that hypothesis,” [God] he is saying that he prefers to explore naturalistic explanations as the default explanation as we all do. He is not saying that anyone who disagrees with him ought to be “expelled” from the academic community. ----You write: “Here, apparently is the source of your confusion:” -----The term “methodological naturalism” for this approach is much more recent. According to Ronald Numbers, it was coined in 1983 by Paul de Vries, a Wheaton College philosopher. I am not the one who is confused, and you are not telling me anything that I don’t already know. In the 1980’s Darwinists decided to get serious about the business of persecuting design thinkers, so they got serious about using the term “methodological naturalism,” which was a new idea formed as an institutional rule to be used against ID dissenters. ----“In a series of articles and books from 1996 onwards, Robert T. Pennock wrote using the term methodological naturalism to clarify that the scientific method confines itself to natural explanations without assuming the existence or non-existence of the supernatural, and is not based on dogmatic metaphysical naturalism as claimed by creationists and proponents of intelligent design, in particular Phillip E. Johnson. Pennock’s testimony as an expert witness at the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial was cited by the Judge in his Memorandum Opinion concluding that “Methodological naturalism is a “ground rule” of science today” Yes, that is a true statement, and I salute the author, whoever he is. Methodological naturalism is a “ground rule.” Did the pre-Socratics have an institutional rule to use as a weapon of expulsion? Of course not. Did scientists in the middle ages have any such mandate? Not on you life. ----“Methodological naturalism by Christians is historically supported:” As I have made abundantly cleaer, that simply is not true. Secularism and materialistic monism have always been with us, but you can’t pass that off as methodological naturalism. The latter is strictly a 20th century novelty. You continue to miss the distinction. Here it is again: To say that science is “primarily” about natural causes [common sense] is not “to say that science must be “exclusively” about natural causes [methodological naturalism]. The difference is only everything. ----“I don’t know where you learned the history of the philosophy of science, but if you paid tuition to do so, I’d try to get my money back if I were you.” Once again, you are making me laugh. It is not I who feels the need to go Googling, since my investigation on this matter long preceded our discussion. As one who must resort to changing definitions and historical rewrites to defend an indefensible position, you can't afford to take that tone. All that you have proven with your latest foray into the history of science is that you will twist facts and change definitions for the purpose of distorting the truth. The truth is that methodological naturalism, as it is understood and practiced today, has no pre-20th century history. None.StephenB_{April 29, 2009
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