From: "John Dale" <johnd-AT-northlink.com>
Date: Wed, 26 Nov 1997 23:28:15 -0700
Subject: PKF: Bunge and Materialism


Dear Robert Basso:

>... do you
> have a positive philosophy of science?<<
> 
> No I don't have a positive philosophy #of# science, although I feel I
> have a positive philosophy of life.  I don't think science and life
> should be identified, and science should serve life not life serve
> science.

	Robert, I don't follow your reasoning here. Without
information in various forms including genetic and
environmental, life could not exist, survive, and evolve,
Without the "science" and information that nature has
embodied in our bodies, we would not be alive. Without
sufficiently accurate senses delivering information to our
brains, we would fall prey to all kinds of hazards.
Without investigation and exploitation of reality, we would
still be living in caves. So I see science as pretty
fundamental, both as constitutive of life, in a sense, and
certainly in terms of the action of gaining and generating
information at higher and higher levels of generality, I
thus think of science in a very broad biological sense, as
something that organisms do in order to survive, and I
think you're taking 'science' in a very narrow,
techno-cultural sense, as something that simply makes life
more problematic, so we wind up saying very different types
of things about it. Let's try to zero in on what we are
actually refering to by this word.


> 
> In serving life,  I believe science is negative or negating.  For
> instance, evolution negates creation and so on.  

	Again I don't really follow you. Evolution may negate
instantaneous special creation, if that is what you are
refering to, but it is not logically necessary to see
creation as an instantaneous act, is it? An artist can take
years to finish a piece of work.  Or, maybe in God's eyes,
the totality is already there in his theological eternal
mental space, so to speak, but as subsets of the whole and
under the conditions of temporal succession, i.e., to our
eyes, it takes time for this creation to manifest itself to 
us.

	Another related idea: Maybe we just don't see things on the right
scale. An example might be to imagine that we are actually
like cells in a muscle. We know that things around us seem
to be moving and changing, and as we examine our
surroundings, we see mechanisms at work, nerve cells
firing, cells dying and being replaced, etc., and to us
this all looks pretty random, but really there is an
overall purpose and direction in the mind of the superbeing
flexing that muscle in order to move some object up to his
mouth to munch on.  If you want my real belief, I feel that 
we are literally in some kind of position like this. We see the universe
from a certain scale of time and space, and on other
scales, things might possibly look very different.  
Ordinary science does not usually take this type of 
perspective seriously into account, but if we really want to be 
scientific about our own perspectives on reality, we need 
to realize that scale may be involved.

> All scientific theories
> and hypotheses negate some form of established wisdom or beliefs that
> apparently have been failing or are insufficient for whatever reason in
> their historical context.  

	What's wrong with that?



> (Speaking of which, as science, what
> instrumental validity does evolutionary theory have other than securing
> paychecks, positions of prestige, royalties, and argumentative defenses
> from its exponents? 

	Are you serious?



> It seems to me that evolutionary theory has no
> greater instrumental validity than creation science, except in having a
> stronger institutional power base at the moment..)  

	I suggest Daniel Dennett's *Darwin's Dangerous Idea* as a
tool of possibly changing your opinion.  The evolutionary
idea has some pretty radical implications for theistic,
Chain of Being types of views of the universe.  I am
learning that I need to respect the evolutionary
perspective more and more.


> Positive science is
> effectively dead science or post-mortem or retrospective science.  

	I'm not sure what you mean by positive science, and 
scientific consultation on likely human futures, for 
example, cannot fit your description of retrospective 
science, as far as I understand what that means to you.


It
> only recounts events and is not introspective or proactive in any way. 

	??

> Computers may be positively introspective 

	??

>but human beings solve problems
> by conjectural refutation.  Any WHAT-IF statement is primarily a negation
> of something prior positively taken for granted.  Positive results might
> accrue from it in utilitarian terms for life.  But that's only material
> or economic benefits, not the actual mental process of scientific
> discovery.  So I'm positive about how science might improve living
> standards, pragmatically, but I'm not positive about science qua science
> in any way.

	Is logic a part of science in your view? 

> 
> >>Just how do you see evolutionary models as "presumptive metaphysical
> articles of faith"?<< 
> 
> They all presume more complex species life forms evolved from simpler
> species life forms but I've never seen this take place

	But how long have you been looking? 


> and on the
> microscopic biochemical level of life the chances of this happening are
> extremely small.  To deal with this problem, evolutionary models presume
> mutations must have occurred or some other kind of cosmic disruption of
> the natural order or natural selection.  Such theory is fine from
> evolutionists' contextual perspective but because macro species mutations
> or cosmic disruptions have no way of being proven anymore than a divine
> force intervening in nature can be positively proven...

	I think one problem here is your notion of species and 
taking this concept in an essentialist manner.  Dennett 
points out very clearly how this type of view is incorrect. 
A new species is not something that can be determined 
prospectively but only retrospectively.

	Secondly, mutation per se is not an assumption but a very 
solidly confirmed fact. I think some biologists will say 
that we have in fact seen the emergence of new species as a 
result of mutations.


> 
>  As far as the fossil evidence of intermediaries, the fact that patterns
> are very evident and certain accurate biological inferences can be made
> from them, still doesn't say anything about how a species came into
> existence.  It only says life forms have deep recursive similarities;
> which is evident from DNA.  But this kind of patterened natural order in
> creation could just have been God's will anyway.  To attribute it to some
> sort of cosmic punctuated equilibrium forces that just happened by pure
> chance stretches the imagination into metaphysics because these are
> untestable hypotheses.  Perhaps they're too positive (or certain of
> themselves) to be scientifically testable.

	There are lots of scientific ideas that cannot be
immediately fully tested.  The uniformity of the laws of
nature is one such assumption.  We will never be able to
be at all places in the universe and at all times in order
to be able to test such an assumption. As long as we have
no evidence to contradict it, however, we are ethically
correct in using it. The assumption *can* be tested
locally, and local tests of the uniformity assumption have
revealed no evidence to negate the assumption. 

	As far as I know, however, there is no way *at all* to
test the "God's Will" theory, because absolutely everything is
compatible with it, and because God for some reason
refuses to cooperate with scientists in a rational way to
definitely prove His existence. These problems make the will of
God hypothesis a definitely inferior hypothesis. If someone
wishes to believe that God (or the Devil) created the
fossil record just to tempt him or her into believing in
Darwinism and to lapse out of the True Faith, he or she can be
my guest, but why should such people wish to hang out on a
philosophy of science list?

> 
> >>I would suggest Mario Bunge's *Scientific Materialism* and 
> his 10-volume *Treatise on Basic Philosophy* before talking 
> about "hardcore materialism". <<
> 
> Is this the official Bible of Materialism?  Are you saying that if I
> don't read it (and perhaps digest its contents as you would like me to) I
> have no right to be talking about materialism as a modern secularist
> phenomenon from my own impressions, reference, and viewpoints?

	I'm saying you might wish to be helpful to yourself by
reading about what a systematic and updated version of
materialism can be. Why talk about straw-men materialisms? 
Materialism, as Bunge defines it, is certainly not a
"credo" to be "believed" fanatically, nor are Bunge's books
a Bible. Bunge takes pains to try to rid materialism of its
scientifically unsustainable crudities and to make it into
a rigorous, coherent, connected set of axioms, assumptions,
definitions and theorems which can be falsified.

 
	Sincerely,

	John Dale
 
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