Evolution, Enlightenment and American Philosophy a blog by Jeff Carreira

Entries tagged as ‘Science’

Scientific Fundamentalism

November 27, 2009 · 20 Comments

To finish (at least for the time being) with this idea of Scientism vs. Science. I want to take it a little further so that I hope I am able to make clear what I percieve as a problem that arises  sometimes (and not always) in the scientifically minded. As I attempted to make clear in my last post, I do not feel – at this point at least – that science itself is problematic. I feel that science is sometimes applied and generallized in ways that are problematic. This isn’t really a problem of science itself; if anything it is a problem of the philosophy of science. Getting back to this idea of Scientism, I believe that Scientism could also be called Scientific Fundamentalism. Science is a method of inquiry utilizing hypothesis and experimentation. Science is also the body of knowledge accumulated through that method. Scientific Fundamentalism is the belief that all knowledge gained through, and all conclusions drawn from, the scientific method are true. When this kind of Scientific fundamentalism is confused for the scientific method it creates a bounded circular reality in which things are true according to scientific fundamentalism (now confused with the scientific method itself) because they were produced by the scientific method. Conversely, knowledge which is not gained through the scientific method is at best suspect and often dismissed as illogical and untrue because it was not obtained through the scientific method.

Adherence to this scientific fundamentalist view over time can lead to the creation of what I see as a very limited worldview. In other words if you only believe in knowledge which is obtained through the scientific method, soon you only see as real things that have been, or conceivable could be, obtained through the scientific method. Your fundamental notion of reality becomes bound by what has been, and what you can imagine could be, confirmed through experiment, observation and measurement. The scientific worldview that results tends to have certain fundamental characteristics. It tends to be materialistic in the sense of seeing the world as made up of only those things that can be observed and measured. It also privileges the third person, objective, external perspective of reality to the first person, internal, subjective perspective of reality. And it sees the world as constructed from the bottom-up, with parts combining to form wholes, as opposed to top-down with wholes exerting influence over the development of the parts that create them. This leads to a view of an unintelligent process of creation proceeding blindly as opposed to a process guided by a larger whole.

The problem with any form of fundamentalism is that it inherently limits inquiry by establishing boundaries around what is possibly real. Christian fundamentalism limits what is real with a literal interpretation of the bible. There can be an argument made for the moral value of adherence to a literal interpretation of the bible, but most of us would agree that it creates a very limited, predetermined worldview. Scientific fundamentalism works the same way. By using the criteria that only knowledge that is obtained through the scientific method defines what is real, and then taking the even bigger step of applying that criteria (consciously or unconsciously) not only to the knowledge at hand, but to all possible knowledge, we draw a circle around not only everything that is real, but also everything that could ever be real. Both of the original Pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, as well as their friend and mentor Chauncey Wright, were opposed to such scientism albeit for different reasons.

Chauncey Wright was too much of an empiricist to fall into scientism. He believed that only things that had been empirically measured were true and he did not believe in generalizing measured results to included as yet unmeasured instances. Peirce followed Wright in this strict empiricism. Both men would go so far as to say that just because the three angles of every triangle ever measured add to 180 degrees doesn’t mean that every triangle that could ever be measured would add up to 180 degrees. Further they would also say that because our ability to measure the angles of a triangle is limited by the instruments that we use to measure with, we can’t even be sure that the angles add to 180 degrees. They were in affect too scientific to believe in the superstition of scientism.

Peirce had an additional reason for avoiding scientism. Peirce’s famous motto and guiding principle was “Do not block the way of inquiry.” Peirce was by far the most accomplished scientist of the early Pragmatists, but he would never adhere to a scientism that would limit the ability of his expansive mind to encompass new and diverse information. William James was a trained doctor, and he was also the most mystically and morally inclined of the three. He avoided scientism because it ruled out the possibility of belief in mystical, religious, and paranormal experiences that he was so drawn to and he felt held moral advantage for humanity.

The Pragmatism that was first conceived by Peirce and James was a magnificent creation. It was in almost equal parts an extension of the scientific method and especially Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection into the world of philosophy. At the same time it stood as a defense of the mystical and religious in the gathering battle with materialism of scientism.

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Religion, Science and Perspective: Let the Games Begin

November 24, 2009 · 3 Comments

I actually had a different post in my queue, but this conversation got so interesting that I thought that I would throw my two cents in and bring it front and center before continuing with my own modest critique of science and introducing the phenomenology of Charles Sanders Peirce as planned.

Tom, I haven’t as yet read Feyerabend, but I certainly will now, and when I do I will print my thoughts here. I have been re-reading Thomas Kuhn on the nature of scientific revolution, a little Wilfred Sellers and his critique of science and some contemporary philosophers namely Joseph Margolis and Robert Brandom. These have all given me a great deal to think about in terms of placing science in context of the progression of human thought.

At Brian’s suggestion I have also read a couple of Michael Shermer’s books and he is, of course, a scientific apologist, ever defending logic and rationality against the dogma of religion and belief. I don’t think he is a joke, in fact he seems like a thoughtful critic of certain entrenched ideas (and he often presents himself as more open-minded than he is sometimes represented by Brain.) In some ways, however, he strikes me as fighting a battle that has already been won – at least among the people I tend to associate with in Integral/Evolutionary circles. Few people in that group are struggling with belief in unfounded dogmatic ways, they either have given up dogma for something new (which could always be a new dogma) or they have found reasons to feel comfortable holding on to more traditional religious beliefs as they move into the future. I think Michael Shermer is largely talking to a different audience.

In one recent book Shermer dismantles the “Intelligent Design” evolutionary position. I myself ascribe to a variation on this idea – that there is some form of teleology in the universe – but the way I think of teleology is far from the intelligent designer personified that is often being promoted by many in the Intelligent Design movement. Pulling apart Intelligent Design as a cardboard veneer stapled over Christian Creationism isn’t terribly hard, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. There is lots of sloppy thinking and bad science mixed in with the great stuff in the intelligent design debate and Shermer has many years of good work ahead clearing it up. Yet again, I don’t think that I or we are really his audience; we are already on his side in that battle.

The battle that I am currently following is the battle in the second half of the 20th century that Tom is referring to in which the shortcomings of science have been placed under a microscope by some brilliant and insightful thinkers. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Science has no method, although Feyerabend may change my mind. I still see science as the triumph of the Western World that has given us so much we enjoy in modern life. I am not ready to tell all the scientists to pack it up and go home because they are not really following a method. I want them to keep going with their method and discover new cures to diseases, better methods of communication and travel, and generally continue to improve the standard of living for people on this planet.

On the other hand and in accordance with many of sciences critics, I don’t want them dictating what is real and what is unreal. When science brought logical positivism, rationality and empiricism to the for front of the Western Mind it rightfully claimed that it had a better handle on truth than did the traditional religion that was its main competitor. At the same time the traditional religions had a right to tell science not to move so fast and throw out the baby with the bathwater. After all it wasn’t science that pulled Western Europe through the Dark Ages. It was, for all it faults, Christianity that stopped warlords from killing each other and everyone else in the process by getting them to pledge allegiance to a common king in the person of Jesus and then sending them off to fight a common enemy in the crusades. As horrendous as the crusades were – and they were for sure – they also bought Western Europe enough peace to rebuild the population that had been decimated by the plagues and then move beyond the system of feudalism to the nation state.

Similarly as the limits of science are being explored we also want to keep the discussion in a historical context. Science is a perspective on reality that mistakes itself for the whole of reality – hmmmm, the same could be said about religion. The kind of objective handle on truth that science claims is not objective. Science often fails to see its assumptions about reality as assumptions and mistakes them for “givens” (Wilfred Sellers). Science also fails to see itself in the historical context in which it was developed (Kuhn) and therefore neglects the cultural forces that have helped shape its point of view.

So the modernism of science has been overrun in some quadrants – and not those in which Michael Shermer is currently fighting the good fight of modernism  – by post-modernism. Post-modernism sees right through the problems of science. It sees how scientists fail to recognize that their point of view is not merely a strictly objective assessment of observed facts. Science is a perspective that has been shaped by some complex of conclusions based on observed facts, personal preferences and biases of the scientists involved, and cultural influences that are often mistaken for reality. And so science has been on the run – again in certain quadrants – for decades trying to prove itself and finding its truth claims falling short of its promise in many ways.*

In turn post-modernism is and will find that its own foundation – that all knowledge is a matter of perspective and cultural influence – is also a perspective. Once again we will have mistaken the most recently discovered part of the picture for the whole of reality and we will get up, dust off and continue with our rush toward an ever more integrated understanding of knowledge, ourselves and our relationship to the world. 

*(An interesting example of science on the run is the defense of Behaviorism that Carl is often an eloquent champion of in this blog. I often find myself agreeing with everything Carl says about the powerful perspective of seeing human activity as pure behavior, and yet disagreeing with the spoken and unspoken implications that go along with it. I have read some things that Carl has generously given to me and I can’t (as yet) agree with the hard determinism and denial of internal being that seems to come along with that view. I have also read other contemporary thinkers on the matter and from what I have found the strict interpretations of Behaviorism are generally disregarded as already haven been proven wrong (although I haven’t found that proof in a satisfactory form yet.) Often I think what Carl and some of his circle like Robert Epstein are acctually doing are advancing Skinner’s original work to keep Behaviorism in step with more recent advancements in science, but this is a digression from my original point although an avenue of inquiry that I want to keep on the table.)

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The Purpose of Philosophy and Science

October 31, 2009 · 3 Comments

The existence of God, the nature of freewill – we just seem to keep running into some of the same BIG questions that have orbited around Western philosophy for centuries. I thought it might be a good moment to step back again and consider the best way forward.

Carl in a comment on my post called Cosmic Evolution evoked the use of Ockham’s Razor to explain why he believed that we shouldn’t add any teleology to the picture of evolution. William of Ockham was a monk in the Middle Ages who is credited with the notion that we should always prefer explanations that have the least number of assumptions. The notion of Ockham’s Razor has been used in science and is certainly a good principle to follow. At the same time it isn’t always the case.

 The way that Ockham’s Razor is used in relation to evolution is by saying that chance variations that occur in individuals and the natural selection that occurs through survival advantages can account for the movement of evolution. Since those principles are enough to explain evolution, we shouldn’t add any type of purpose or direction to the explanation. This is certainly a worthy application of Ockham’s Razor, but it doesn’t prove that there is no deeper directionality also at work in evolution.

Our understanding of evolution isn’t at a point where we could either disprove or prove the existence of a directional force in the universe’s evolution. The best counter argument to the above comes from the so-called Anthropic Principle. If we assume that there is nothing but chance variation and survival to account for evolution then we are saying that the universe as we see it has come about randomly.

The Anthropic Principle states that the conditions of the universe necessary for a life form like ours to have evolved are so exact and so complex that the odds of this universe having evolved are virtually infinity to one against. With odds such as that it seems impossible to rule out at least the possibility of some guiding principle at work in tandem with chance variation and natural selection. The Anthropic Principle certainly doesn’t prove the existence of such purpose – as some of its more religious minded adherents would like to think – but at least in my mind it does leave open the possibility.

Similarly on the individual level as Carl has also pointed out Behaviorism can explain the development of human behavior on the basis of reinforcement and conditioning. Again as powerful an explanation as this is, it isn’t proof that there is nothing else at work.

What I find interesting is why do we as individuals choose to tend to lean toward one side or the other in these debates. William James believed that in the end it was a matter of temperament. He claimed that any person tends to be either hard-minded or tender-minded. The hard-minded find solace in facts and determined causes. The tender-minded find solace in more mystical notions of purpose and intent. In the end James believed that how we saw things had more to do with our character than any objective account of reality.

I believe there is something to this, but I would add a related notion which has to do with the purposes we are invested in. If our purposes are more scientific (and I mean this in a very broad sense) then we are motivated to try to find the objective truth. That is the truth that most accurately and unbiased reflects observable facts. If our purposes are more philosophical (again in a very broad sense), I believe that we are (or should be) motivated to create a picture of reality that creates the optimal navigation system for human development at all levels. I suppose that already shows my bias, but I think it is something worth considering. Are the aims of philosophy and science the same or different?

Carl also said in his comment that he felt that we can build a morality based on humanistic values. I am not so sure about that. I think that ultimately our moral sense is directly related to our most fundamental conception of the nature of reality. That is why I believe that the reality of evolution provides a potential platform upon which to rethink our moral basis. The Western World has moved largely outside of the influence of the great religious traditions and so far a humanistic morality has not emerged that seems compelling enough to guide us. Maybe evolution will be the basis for a new morality.

I had a thought the other day that I wanted to use my next few blog posts to run through a thought experiment trying to experience the development of the Western Mind from the fall of Rome to modern times. Could be interesting…

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You Gotta Have Faith

September 2, 2009 · 13 Comments

The philosophical ideas of the American Pragmatist William James were in many ways foundationally based on a profound realization he had about the nature of human life. James grew up in an eccentric family of Irish Americans in the late 19th century. His father, Henry James senior, was a converted Swedenborgian who wanted the best possible education for all of his children, although he seemed to have a hard time making up his mind determining what that education should be. So Henry dragged his children from American to Europe and back again following educational opportunities and the whims of his children. The first educational program that William James actually completed was a medical degree at Harvard. Still, of Henry’s five children, one, William, would become one of America’s greatest psychologists and philosophers and another, Henry Jr., would become one of America’s greatest novelists.

All of the James children were somewhat troubled and William was no exception. As a young man he suffered from frequent depression. During one occasion he was contemplating suicide when something occurred to him that would color all of his thinking. He realized that at a very fundamental level he was choosing what to believe and specifically, I imagine, he was choosing to believe that he had no choice in the matter of suicide. Realizing that belief was a choice he boldly decided to believe that he had a choice.

William still suffered from depression on and off for his entire life, but he had come to a profound understanding of human nature. Human life is an act of faith. At the bottom of it all, we all take something to be true on faith. Some may believe in God, some may believe in the power of reason, some may believe in science, but everyone has to believe in something. Even if you believe that “you don’t believe” or that “you don’t know” those are still based in belief, because underneath both is a belief that “not believing” or “not knowing” is the best way to believe. Human life is an act of faith. To live we have to believe in something. Any choice that we make reflects some belief – and the choice “not to make a choice” is also a choice. So there is no way out.

During the Modern Age it was increasingly believed that the discovery of the power of reason had taken humanity beyond the need for faith. We no longer need to believe in God or the word of the Bible. We now could use our capacity for thinking to come to an “objective” understanding of what is true. What happens if we look closely at the process of reason? Reason is the use of concepts to create an understanding of reality that allows us to explain, predict and control events. As reason and its particularly powerful application, science, developed through the second half of the last millennium humanity seemed to become increasingly better at explaining, predicting and controlling events.

But how do we know that our reasoned scientific explanations of reality are actually “real”? because they work. If a scientific theory or a reasoned idea about reality stops working we assume it is false and we come up with a better one. So at any given instant we are taking our scientific understanding on faith.

This belief in science was justified because there was a more fundamental belief in the scientific method. We believe in spite of the fact that many theories prove to be false that in general we are heading toward a more and more accurate representation of reality. That is why in the 20th century when reason and science played such prominent roles in events such as the Nazi Holocaust and the atomic bomb detonations on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many people began to conclude that science wasn’t working. But the fact that it works is the only reason that we believe in it in the first place. If it doesn’t work, is it really true? Some had lost faith in science – not in its ability to predict and control events, but in its ability to lead humanity in a morally sound direction.

To my mind science alone is not enough. Science cannot be our spirituality. Science needs to be coupled with some other belief about the nature of reality that can provide a direction for moral decision making. You might be a scientist and a Christian, a scientist and a humanist, or a scientist and a Nazi. All of these will lead to very different results. I believe that William James was realizing that every human life as a matter of definition must be based on a fundamental belief in something. And ultimately that belief is a matter of faith that cannot be proved through prior evidence. Science, religion, humanism, existentialism, agnosticism, skepticism, cynicism, hedonism, idealism, atheism – something has to be the basis for life. Underneath it all we all believe in something and that belief is not something that can be proved through evidence and therefore it is simply a choice that we must make and take responsibility for.

Human life is a risk taken on faith.

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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the 20th Century

August 26, 2009 · 26 Comments

First of all I want to thank everyone for keeping the level of this virtual conversation so high and so philosophically minded. Now that we have opened up a discussion about Science and Spirituality I would like to add a little more historical context to frame it.

During the time of the Middle Ages Christianity grew and fought to become the dominant worldview in the Western World.  That means that the vast majority of people believed that the Bible contained an infallible recording of the Truth as God presented it to humanity. No matter what you felt about it, no matter what you thought about it, the fact always remained that what the Bible said was the ultimate Truth that described Reality.

Then in the 17th Century the Western Enlightenment erupted. The scientific and philosophical thinkers of that age began to realize that the human mind had the power to understand reality. These great thinkers began to uncover a natural order that was governed by unchangeable laws and their success led to miraculous discoveries and achievements.

Still, during this time and on into the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the Enlightenment thinkers still believed in God, but the nature of that belief changed and gave birth to Liberal Theology. The Bible was increasingly seen not as the literal word of God flawlessly recorded by the prophets (Old Testament) and the Apostles (New Testament), but now was seen as an interpretation of God’s word as created by these great figures. The Bible was then not something to be taken literally, but to be continually studied and reinterpreted so that the essential wisdom contained in the words could be distilled out.

As Science continued to triumph another interpretation of traditional religious views took a strong hold. This was Natural Theology. In Natural Theology there remained a belief in God, but now God was seen as the initiator of a mechanical process. God was the clock-maker, but once he/she wound the clock up it continued to operate with no need of further intervention. Deism was an 18th century form of faith that held this view, and most of America’s founders were Deists. What Natural Theology allowed for was a belief in God that could be completely severed from Christian dogma.

Then a funny thing happened on the way to the 20th Century – Charles Darwin published ”On the Origin of Species.” Evolution was discussed long before Darwin, but it never threatened the belief in God like it did afterward. Prior to Darwin, no matter how cleverly science could explain the workings of natural law there remained a need for a Creator that had created this miraculous world.  If you look at the vast complexity and interconnectivity of our living world – not to mention our own human form – there is no way to imagine that it just appeared here this way. Just like if you pick up a wristwatch on the beach, you would never assume that it just appeared there, someone obviously made it. So to with our world, someone obviously made it and that someone was God.

But Darwin punched a big hole in that idea because he devised an understanding of the mechanism of evolution through Natural Selection that could explain how we and our world could have been created as a consequence of the need to survive and the occurrence of chance variations in Nature. This explanation was based only on simple observable “natural laws” that required no outside intelligence to guide them – and it has held up (with some modification) for over 150 years!

In our modern times Darwin’s theory of evolution frames the Science vs. Spirituality debate. In 1925 the “Scope’s Monkey Trial” pitted believers against evolutionists and although the believers won the trial, the debate cranked up the argument into high gear. American Fundamentalism with its insistence on a literal interpretation of the Bible galvanized around the issue of evolution. And in response many in the scientific community veered steadily toward an increasingly materialistic and deterministic worldview.

Is there a higher intelligence than the human ability to reason in the Universe? Is there a purpose driving the process of cosmic evolution? To my mind these are the questions upon which the debate of Science vs. Spirituality rests today. Spirituality if it means anything means a belief and alignment with a universal purpose. Whether it be in a traditional religious context or not, spirituality is an appeal to some higher intelligence, not necessarily one that is separate and apart from human intelligence, but one at least that transcends (while including) our normal faculty for reason and understanding.

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Science vs. Spirituality

August 24, 2009 · 15 Comments

My mind is still not up to full speed after being on retreat, but I am thrilled by all of the back and forth on the topic of spirituality. It is, as we can see, a particularly charged area of discussion. And given that part of my purpose is to look at things through the lens of American Philosophy, it is good to mention that the topic of spirituality is particularly charged in this nation. Freedom of religious choice and the separation of church and state have left America much more religiously oriented than other developed nations with many more active religious denominations, sects and experimental spiritual communities of all kind.

In our discussion I would like to look into what spirituality is while remaining as intellectually rigorous and philosophically rooted as possible. So to start I would like to take a look at the nature of philosophy itself. I propose that philosophy in its most general sense can be understood as “The human endeavor to understand the nature and functioning of reality.” Human beings are thinking animals that use ideas to guide action. Philosophy is the human effort to create ideas that accurately describe the way things are so that we can use those ideas as a basis for acting.

In the development of Western philosophy there have been two approaches to the endeavor of philosophy that persist to this very day. These two ways of going about philosophy are sometimes known as Rationalism and Empiricism and in fact these distinctions existed long before the terms were created to describe them.

In short, Rationalistic thinkers put their faith in reason. They mistrust sense experience that is not mitigated by reason because they recognize that our senses can deceive us about reality. For this reason they believe that ultimate truth lies in the realm of ideas and reason. Empiricists, on the other hand, put their faith in our sense experience of the world. They mistrust ideas that are not grounded in sense experience because they see that ideas on there own easily fly into fantasy. Science as we know it today can be seen as a special case of Empiricism and Spirituality as a special case of Rationalism.

Science is an Empirical pursuit that makes use of the scientific method for determining the truth from our sense experience and has as its aim a complete understanding of the material world. The scientific method involves hypothesizing a theory and then testing the theory through experimentation.  Only information that is obtained in this way is truly scientific. If a theory is not testable it is not considered scientific.

Spirituality is a Rationalistic pursuit that maintains the validity of “revealed truth” and that has as its aim the moral transformation of the individual to act in accordance with revealed truth.  In traditional religious terms revealed truth was seen as the word of God – for instance as recorded in the Bible. In our own time revealed truth has come to be interpreted as personal “spiritual” experience which seems to “reveal” something of the ultimate nature of things to the experiencer. These revealed truths are generally seen as being self-evident and therefore no experimental testing is required to “prove” them.

Early in human understanding the distinction between philosophy, science, and spirituality was not clear and all three were intermingled. With the age of Enlightenment these distinctions became clearer. And over the centuries Religion has been largely usurped by Science as the dominant world view in the Western World.

So this question of “Does spirituality have any significance in the modern age?” is one that humanity has been wrestling with for a long time. In Christian philosophy the defense of religion is called apologetics. And you can see the arguments of apologists appearing and reappearing throughout the history of human understanding defending the validity of “revealed Truth” in an increasingly empirically driven world.  So my question to myself and to all of you is “Does Spirituality have any validity and if so, what is it?”

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