Is science materialistic?

[qcrisp]

To be fair - in other words, to concede a point - there are areas that are clearly contested between accepted scientific theory and a religious theory, the obvious case being that of intelligent design.

Intelligent design, for some reason, seems to be a very popular theological argument, but there are plenty of theologians who think it's a red herring.

I don't, myself, have an ultimate conclusion on whether theology and science must meet at some point. Partly this is because I know more about the former than the latter. (I'm also still falling into the contemporary habit of using 'science' to mean 'the physical sciences'.) In the case of the cosmological argument, however, at least, we can see where the aims diverge. The classic atheist response to the cosmological argument, "What made god then?" or, to put it in the terms that Bertrand Russell used (I paraphrase from memory), "If God can exist without a cause, then why can't the universe?" - this response, I think, draws a line. The atheist is saying here, "We don't need to think of anything outside the natural."

Personally, I find it very odd that, for instance, Russell can make such a response - I have great respect for Russell, but... - and leave a self-caused universe just hanging there and not then think, "What an odd thing a self-caused universe is."

It's at this point that I feel either the inadequacy of words, or my own inadequacy in using them.

I wouldn't like to speak on behalf of theologians, but it really seems to me something like this: either we have a God-caused universe or a self-caused one. Both ideas are extraordinary. The idea of the God-caused universe, however, has the advantage that it allows us to acknowledge and examine the extraordinariness of the situation - it provides language and licence to do so. It's more than that, though. I would say - and I think I am not alone here - that it is precisely in this extraordinariness that we find reality.

 

[Mr. Veech]

The idea of a self-caused universe is just as absurd as a universe created by a completely self-sufficent being. We would have to look at other arguments in order to conclude which point of view is less absurd.

 

[Mr. Veech]

I'm not sure that any atheist has given an adequate explanation for any of the various things human beings have taken for granted in terms of moral development.

The idea that a purposeless process could produce a virtue-obsessed individual is downright absurd.

I'll say it again, there's no reason to suppose that science is inherently materialistic. Those that do have a specific agenda in mind that has nothing to do with rational argumentation.

 

[cannibal cop]

I'm not sure that any atheist has given an adequate explanation for any of the various things human beings have taken for granted in terms of moral development.

I’ll go you one further: I am fairly sure that no one, atheist, believer, or otherwise, has ever given, or ever will give, an “adequate” explanation of any phenomenon that encompasses the entirety of human experience.

The idea that a purposeless process could produce a virtue-obsessed individual is downright absurd.

And...? I guess my question is, what the hell idea isn’t ultimately absurd on some level when examined in the cold light of an utterly amoral universe where all existence is predicated on suffering? It’s certainly a lot easier for me to believe that such a process could produce a species of neurotics obsessed with self-image, than to believe that a reasonably intelligent and compassionate species would consider blindly perpetuating such an inhumane process morally acceptable.

 

[qcrisp]

No, science is not inherently materialistic. The notion that it is happens to be a product of the 19th and 20th century. Plenty of scientific discoveries were made by theists. As a matter of fact, many of them believed that the uniformity of nature, which science presupposes, requires some degree of intelligence. It does seem rather strange to believe that a closed physical system could be governed by "laws."

I'm not sure that any atheist has given an adequate explanation for any of the various things human beings have taken for granted in terms of moral development.

Reading back over these, I'm reminded of a lecture by Linda Zagzebski, who has written some interesting stuff about epistemology. Anyway, her contention in the lecture is that the two greatest ideas of human history are:


1. The idea that the human mind can grasp the universe.
2. The idea that the human mind can grasp itself.


As she says at the beginning, these ideas are so taken for granted that people don't appreciate that they didn't always exist; not appreciating that they didn't always exist, they don't see how influential the ideas are.


The lecture is not exactly sparkling, but I found it interesting:


[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgv0nYbO9gA[/ame]


In particular, this is relevant to this thread because she says the first great idea made possible "the great world religions, philosophy, mathematics, and science."

 

[Sad Marsh Ghost]

This conversation is so baffling. I don't really like the atheism vs meaning binary. Believing in a specific God seems dumb as there isn't any compelling reason to believe a particular mythical character exists over the others and major religions clearly just spread through the world via who conquered whom, but I think most atheists wouldn't agree with nihilism and do feel a sense of universal purpose. Most atheists aren't pessimists or nihilists and have traditional moral outlooks. They also breed a lot.

Atheism isn't extreme nihilism or absolute certainty that current materialist science is right about everything. Atheism is the lack of belief in a deity. If you want to dispute atheism you have to argue for why God or gods definitely exist. Vague 'There might be a greater meaning to life beyond our grasp!' arguments aren't refutations of atheism. Most atheists believe that. I believe that.

 

[qcrisp]

I don't really like the atheism vs meaning binary. Believing in a specific God seems dumb as there isn't any compelling reason to believe a particular mythical character exists over the others and major religions clearly just spread through the world via who conquered whom, but I think most atheists wouldn't agree with nihilism and do feel a sense of universal purpose. Most atheists aren't pessimists or nihilists and have traditional moral outlooks. They also breed a lot.

I tend not to like 'if you're not with us you're against us' binaries. Stephen Fry was able to quote Chesterton approvingly that when you stop believing in God you will believe in anything. It's actually questionable whether this is a Chesterton quote:

https://www.chesterton.org/ceases-to-worship/

Anyway, Fry clearly is not a theist. The context of his using this quote was his antipathy towards the New Age movement, which here came under the "anything" in which people will believe. It seemed like Fry wanted a clear binary there, between theism and atheism. I don't support this view.

However, I do think that atheists - as far as I have observed - are inconsistent in their metaphysics. You're quite right that they usually have traditional moral outlooks. The question is, are they being consistent with their own metaphysics by having those outlooks? I would say no.

 

[Sad Marsh Ghost]

Finding no convincing reason to believe in a specific deity/creator only contradicts the idea a specific deity/creator exists. Somebody could believe in star signs or ghosts or whatever and be an atheist. They'd just answer with 'I don't really know' when asked how the universe came to exist, rather than pointing to the incredibly specific story of the Bible or whichever arbitrary religion they were raised in or stumbled upon.

 

[qcrisp]

Just to make what I said a bit clearer, if a person discovers there is an objective meaning to life, it does not therefore follow that they must become specifically a Christian, or specifically a Muslim, or... etc.

I take it that is what you are saying, and I agree.

Among the negative effects of religion, I would say, is precisely that it has tended to enforce this dichotomy - you are 'one of us' or life is meaningless.

I reject this as a metaphysical claim, though there might have been all kinds of other reasons for the claim historically.

What I am saying is that if one notices that one has moral values and so on, the obvious next question is, "Are these values real?" If you conclude that they are, you must then ask what that says about the universe. This is a matter of metaphysical consistency.

As I said, I don't see atheists following through on the implications of their values. Obviously I am not omniscient, etc., so I can only talk about what I have observed. There is also the possibility of some kind of unbridgeable cognitive gap. In other words, it's possible that I simply 'don't understand'. If I have an actual conversational partner, I will tend to assume a cognitive gap for the sake of politeness. I feel no such obligation when merely reading juvenile comments under YouTube videos or in other, comparable situations.

 

[qcrisp]

The phrase 'specific deity' reminds me of a quote from Dawkins. I'll paste here something I wrote to someone about that recently:


To give an example of how [the assumption that God is a 'creature'] might operate in a subtle way, there's this quote from Dawkins: “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” However, the thought expressed here works by counting the gods of polytheism alongside the gods of monotheism. I think you would have to first demonstrate that you're counting the same kind of thing before this argument - such as it is - has any traction. It seems to me though - I am open to being corrected on this point - that the gods of polytheism, immortal and immaterial though they may be, are, nonetheless, creatures. I think there's some ambiguity at the edges of polytheism here, but Dawkins is basically making his point by conflating things from different categories as if they belonged to one.

 

[qcrisp]

For some reason, I can't edit that last post at the moment. I just wanted to make some kind of note that "the gods of monotheism" is, in itself, a weird phrase, which is part of the point. But I'm already behind schedule today, so will have to leave it at that for now.

 

[Sad Marsh Ghost]

I don't like Richard Dawkins or the other Horsemen, but I think it's more than fair to say that Ancient Greece's human-behaving omniscient king of men in the sky god Zeus is the 'same sort of thing' as the human-behaving omniscient creator in the sky sole God from Christianity -- not merely in archetype, but due to the lack of compelling evidence for either being ignored in favour of going along with the cultural status quo of the day.

The reason for Christianity being true and older pagan gods being false comes down to the arrogant modern thinking of 'What's going on right now is all that matters!' -- the narrow-minded certainty inexplicably being attributed to science earlier in the thread. Science is a place of doubt.

 

[qcrisp]

I don't like Richard Dawkins or the other Horsemen, but I think it's more than fair to say that Ancient Greece's human-behaving omniscient king of men in the sky god Zeus is the 'same sort of thing' as the human-behaving omniscient creator in the sky sole God from Christianity -- not merely in archetype, but due to the lack of compelling evidence for either being ignored in favour of going along with the cultural status quo of the day.

The reason for Christianity being true and older pagan gods being false comes down to the arrogant modern thinking of 'What's going on right now is all that matters!' -- the narrow-minded certainty inexplicably being attributed to science earlier in the thread. Science is a place of doubt.

I am not much concerned with the God of the Bible. Well, the Bible is a very interesting set of documents, but it is very open to interpretation - to such an extent that I'm going to have to decline to comment on it here in terms of a theological source.


Having said that, even the God of the Bible is certainly different to Zeus in that Zeus has parents.



In any case, it is not at all an obscure theological point - is one of the central tenets of classical theism - that God is not a creature, the meaning here simply being 'a created thing' or 'part of creation'. Zeus, having parents, and being inside the universe, even if in some supernatural way, clearly is.



There is no doubt ambiguity, which is why I put caveats in what I originally wrote. I would guess the ambiguity consists in this: polytheism is still a symbolic means of understanding something like 'cosmic forces', which some hint in them, therefore, of universal metaphysics.


Okay, so I am going to resort to the Bible for something that hints of crossover:


https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts 17:23


Compare this with Xenophanes:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophanes#Theology


Xenophanes lived from the sixth century to the fifth century BC. So, I'm not talking about what's going on right now.

 

[qcrisp]

For some reason, I'm unable to edit my posts at the moment. Sorry they're so gappy. The gaps are put in when I post, not when I write.



Also, this: "which some hint in them" should be "with some hint in them".

 

[qcrisp]

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez7P63gsZOI[/ame]


If I remember correctly, this book (Transcendence and History) explains something of the relation between polytheism and monotheism:


https://philosophynow.org/issues/72/Transcendence_and_History_by_Glenn_Hughes


Let us say, for instance, that polytheism is a different way of understanding the same thing as monotheism - the former understands that thing (whatever it is) more mythologically, the latter understands it more metaphysically or theologically. However, there's not a clean break between the two. You'll see the beginnings of the new way of understanding in the Old Testament, but also with people like Xenophanes. But you also have plenty of mythological trappings in the OT.

 

[Robin Davies]

What I am saying is that if one notices that one has moral values and so on, the obvious next question is, "Are these values real?" If you conclude that they are, you must then ask what that says about the universe. This is a matter of metaphysical consistency. As I said, I don't see atheists following through on the implications of their values.

I don't really understand this point. As an atheist I have moral values which are obviously real but I don't think this says anything about "the universe". Our moral values are made up by us, based on all sorts of factors like our upbringing, social conventions, whatever makes life easier/safer/more enjoyable for us etc.

 

[qcrisp]

What I am saying is that if one notices that one has moral values and so on, the obvious next question is, "Are these values real?" If you conclude that they are, you must then ask what that says about the universe. This is a matter of metaphysical consistency. As I said, I don't see atheists following through on the implications of their values.

I don't really understand this point. As an atheist I have moral values which are obviously real but I don't think this says anything about "the universe". Our moral values are made up by us, based on all sorts of factors like our upbringing, social conventions, whatever makes life easier/safer/more enjoyable for us etc.

"I have moral values which are obviously real"
"Our moral values are made up by us"


And this is what I don't understand, which is why I spoke of a cognitive gap. To me, these two statements are mutually exclusive.

 

[qcrisp]

Okay, in a bit more detail.

I don't really understand this point. As an atheist I have moral values which are obviously real but I don't think this says anything about "the universe".

How can they be at once obviously real and also say nothing about the universe? (I'm not sure of the significance of the quote marks in this case.) What is meant here by "real"? Is the universe purely physical (one of the questions of this thread)? If so, then, presumably the moral values are also physical, in order to be real. In which case, they have come from the universe and we find moral values to be part of the physical universe. Or they might not be physical. If they are real and non-physical, then we obviously at least have non-physical realities, and a minimum commitment to dualism, or they might come from outside the physical universe.

Our moral values are made up by us, based on all sorts of factors like our upbringing, social conventions, whatever makes life easier/safer/more enjoyable for us etc.

Does this mean they are free inventions? Is child molesting (I realise that's emotive, but insert whatever reprehensible act you would prefer) bad today but good tomorrow if we change our minds? If so, in what sense are the values real? Note that I originally was talking about objective values. Of course, anyone can claim to have subjective values, but then there are problems in talking about what is right and wrong intersubjectively, rather than what is simply preferred by the individual.

 

[Sad Marsh Ghost]

Good and bad are subjective. I don't understand why they wouldn't be subjective if God engineered us.

Mainstream monotheist religion is too rampant with child molestation for me to believe certainty in God is any good at preventing it. It doesn't get any more pious than the Catholic church, surely.

 

[qcrisp]

The message board format and lack of time can lead one to give tennis-like answers (hitting back the ball that's coming your way), which I'm wary of.
As I have deadlines at the moment, I will have to stop commenting here for a while, or keep to a strict limit. Before doing so, I thought I might attempt a general post.
There are, of course, questions that you can keep zooming in on to a very high definition of detail at almost any point of the arguments under discussion. I've tried to lay out, at least, some variety of positions. It seems that if the universe is only matter, then matter is itself perhaps incomprehensibly weird, and the term 'mere' just won't do as a prefix. My own current sympathies are for substance dualism, but it's not that I don't see any problems with this position. I have posted material here relating to panpsychism, which is another option. One thing that makes me hesitate about panpsychism is 'the grain problem' - that is, it's hard to see how particles of consciousness can add up to the unity of a conscious subject. Nonetheless, it seems like panpsychism is worth looking into. There's also Russellian monism, which overlaps with panpsychism.
Why do I say 'worth looking into'? Because there are things about the universe that cannot - I believe - simply be conveniently brushed under the rug. I have not been contemplating these things in an echo chamber - that is, not in a chamber that echoes my own thoughts. It took me years of deferring to the physicalist-atheist position that was and is the social norm in the circles in which I move, before I started to say to myself, "This simply makes no sense." That's not to say that others exploring the same questions/problems will end up moving towards the conclusions that seem like my current destinations. But I do think it would be good if people really engaged in the problems more.

This is the paper from which I quoted at the beginning of this thread:
[ame]http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~dh25/seminarofthesoul/Lycan%20-%20Giving%20Dualism%20its%20Due.pdf[/ame]
The paper is written by a physicalist. His motivation appears to be to encourage other physicalists to up their game when it comes to physicalist arguments. There's a similar essay somewhere online by the atheist philosopher Quentin Smith, in which he is criticising the state of current atheist discourse, apparently in the hope of getting atheist philosophers to up their game. I might post a link to that later, too, if I can find it, etc.
I suppose there are some metaphysical (or other) commitments that run very deep, and these vary from individual to individual, which is why this kind of discussion apparently changes very few minds on either side. This is also one reason why I wonder about a cognitive gap, and tend to assume one when I am in a serious conversation with an atheist and/or physicalist on these subjects. Having said that, I hope, after all, that the gap is not unbridgeable, that there is at least some chance of mutual benefit from such conversations.
Well, I'll have to finish here for now.