Science and Philosophy

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Does Science explain everything? Or does it rest on philosophical assumptions?

“For scientific inquiry itself rests on a number of philosophical assumptions: that there is an objective world external to the minds of scientists; that this world is governed by causal regularities; that the human intellect can uncover and accurately describe these regularities; and so forth. Since science presupposes these things, it cannot attempt to justify them without arguing in a circle.”


Part 1


Part 2
 
Yes, the idea that science is all that is needed to understand reality rests on several philosophical assumptions, which Edward Feser, discusses in the first linked article.
 
Science by its nature can only talk on things that are observable and testable. There are concepts in this world that by their very nature, science can’t comment on. What is justice? Beauty? Funny? Right and wrong? Science can be used to argue for these things, but we can’t measure how much justice a thing or act has.
 
JimG said:
Yes, the idea that science is all that is needed to understand reality rests on several philosophical assumptions, which Edward Feser, discusses in the first linked article.
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I am turned off by Feser’s nastiness.
 
JimG said:
Does Science explain everything? Or does it rest on philosophical assumptions?
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Philosophy has its own set of assumptions, Some of its assumptions are not verifiable. Further there is a lot of disagreement among professional philosophers. You don’t find too much disagreement among mathematicians. And many times scientists can resolve at least some of their disagreements by experiment. How do philosophers resolve their disagreements except by more discussions after which there is still disagreement and the definitive solution to many questions is still elusive and up in the air.
 
AlNg said:
I am turned off by Feser’s nastiness.
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Nastiness? In that article?

Then you must be absolutely repulsed by the likes of Krauss, Dawkins, Hitchens, Bill Maher, and a few others I could name.
 
AlNg said:
Philosophy has its own set of assumptions, Some of its assumptions are not verifiable.
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Philosophy doesn’t traffic in verifiability. That would be the domain of science.

Philosophy begins with premises or axioms that are deemed ‘self-evident’ to competent rational minds.

Quite often those axioms are paradigmatically true in that their denial entails absurd or self-contradictory conclusions.

In that sense philosophy is more like mathematics than it is like science.

Granted mathematics begins with abstract principles or axioms that are assumed to be true within specific mathematical domains, but philosophy deals with objective reality and the principles or basic axioms which are needed to make any sense of reality to begin with.

Sure ‘anyone’ can assume reality is nonsensical and, therefore, trying to make sense of it is a fool’s errand, but that would be because that ‘anyone’s’ basic philosophical starting point is foolish and irrational.

GIGO is just as true in philosophy as it is in computer science – post-modernism has proven that.
 
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AlNg said:
I am turned off by Feser’s nastiness.
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Feser isn’t nasty. If you’ve read his book The Last Superstition I can understand why you may think so, but even that doesn’t truly qualify as nastiness. He just hits back at the New Atheists with equal and opposite force. It’s all about the intended audience.

Try reading some of his other works and I think you’ll change your mind, but to each their own.
 
AIPM1615 said:
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AlNg:
I am turned off by Feser’s nastiness.
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Feser isn’t nasty. If you’ve read his book The Last Superstition I can understand why you may think so, but even that doesn’t truly qualify as nastiness. He just hits back at the New Atheists with equal and opposite force. It’s all about the intended audience.

Try reading some of his other works and I think you’ll change your mind, but to each their own.
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How cool… I’m now reading that book.
Chapter 1 was just him bashing on everything, starting with the abomination of gay civil marriage and then deciding that the 4 more prominent atheist authors in recent times are basically idiots for not knowing Aristotelian philosophy.
I’m still on chapter 2, where he explains said Aristotelian philosophy, but I’ve been left quite a few times baffled at how he keeps bashing other philosophers, such as Hume, while in the very next page, he does exactly what he accused Hume of doing (and being wrong by doing it).
The latest stupidity by Feser that I read on this chapter was about evolution and how it contradicts the second law of thermodynamics… Coudln’t facepalm enough!
 
"It is also sometimes suggested that the principle in question is disproved by evolution, since if simpler life forms give rise to more complex ones then they must surely be producing in their effects something they did not have to give. In fact evolution does nothing to disprove the principle, and the suggestion that it does rests on the same kind of sloppy thinking that underlies Humean doubts about causation in general.

Every species is essentially just a variation on the same basic genetic material that has existed for billions of years from the moment life began. On the Darwinian story, a new variation arises when there is a mutation in the existing genetic structure which produces a trait that happens to be advantageous given circumstances in a creature’s environment. The mutation in turn might be caused by a copying error made during the DNA replication process or by some external factor like radiation or chemical damage.

Now, just as water and a certain chemical agent are together sufficient to produce a red puddle even if the water by itself wouldn’t be, so too do the existing genetic material, the mutation, and environmental circumstances together generate a new biological variation even though none of these factors by itself would be enough to do so. Thus, evolution no more poses a challenge to the principle that a cause must contain every feature of its effect either “formally” or “eminently” than the puddle example does.

Indeed, as the physicist Paul Davies has pointed out, to deny that the information contained in a new kind of life form derives from some combination of preexisting factors – specifically, in part from the organism’s environment if not from its genetic inheritance alone – would contradict the second law of thermodynamics, which tells us that order (and thus information content) tends inevitably to decrease within a closed system."
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Edward Feser, The Last Superstition

He didn’t say “evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics.”
He said that to deny that evolution derives from a combination of preexisting factors would contradict it.

Not the evolution part, the denial of the factors - which “Humeans” claim invalidates Aristotelian causation. In reality, there is no such denial, and Feser demonstrates that to great length. He was answering an objection to causation, NOT taking a jab at evolution. Context is everything.
 
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(for some reason, the post I wrote got flagged for moderation… -.- )
Something about excessive use of negatives by Feser and how his first chapter primed me to think like this, because he did deny evolution.
 
pocaracas said:
Something about excessive use of negatives by Feser and how his first chapter primed me to think like this, because he did deny evolution.
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“Excessive negatives” might be a bit of a stretch. Just read it slowly and actually consider the points he’s making, so that you don’t miss them altogether.

Dr. Feser disagrees with the universal application of Darwinism, but no, he never once denies evolution. If you actually read the passage I quoted, he says,
“Every species is essentially just a variation on the same basic genetic material that has existed for billions of years from the moment life began.”
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Doesn’t sound like an “evolution denier” to me. Quite the opposite.
 
I don’t want to further derail the topic but I’m going to quote the funniest part of The Last Superstition. When I first read the book I was pretty big into the “Four Horsemen,” and this made me stop and think…
Whereas Dennett proposes explaining “religion as a natural phenomenon,” I propose interpreting naturalism and secularism as a religious phenomena. Or rather, if secularism is not precisely a religion, it is what we might call a counter-religion. It has its counter-saints (Darwin, Darrow, Sagan); its “Old Testament” counter-prophets, stern and forbidding, brimming with apocalyptic doom or at least pessimism (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud); and its kindler and gentler “New Testament” counter-apostles, hopeful for a realization of the Kingdom of Godlessness on earth via “progressive” education policy and other schemes of social uplift (Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens – and into the bargain, each member of this foresome even has his own Gospel). It affords a sense of identity and meaning to those beholden to it, a metaphysics to interpret the world by and a value system to live by, even if all of it is little more than a negation of the sort of metaphysics and morality associated with religion: that is to say, a counter-metaphysics and a counter-morality.
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Yikes. 😂🤨
 
AIPM1615 said:
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pocaracas:
Something about excessive use of negatives by Feser and how his first chapter primed me to think like this, because he did deny evolution.
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“Excessive negatives” might be a bit of a stretch. Just read it slowly and actually consider the points he’s making, so that you don’t miss them altogether.

Dr. Feser disagrees with the universal application of Darwinism, but no, he never once denies evolution. If you actually read the passage I quoted, he says,
“Every species is essentially just a variation on the same basic genetic material that has existed for billions of years from the moment life began.”
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Doesn’t sound like an “evolution denier” to me. Quite the opposite.
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Odd… I do remember reading and thinking he was being a troll about evolution… Just went back to check and, at best, he mocks how natural selection is used by those “Four Horsemen”.
Such mockery does seem to plant a certain bias on the reader’s eyes…

I’m still reading so I’ll wait to see how he proposes to solve some problems… oh wait… god-infused souls that have everything built in, right… right… no need to solve anything, just declare it’s solved a-priori.
Let me know how that works with Capuchin monkeys’ sense of fairness… and other animals that possess some features of what we’d call “morality”.
 
pocaracas said:
Odd… I do remember reading and thinking he was being a troll about evolution… Just went back to check and, at best, he mocks how natural selection is used by those “Four Horsemen”.
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Again, “at best” is a stretch. He doesn’t mock natural selection. He mocks social darwinism, as well as the flawed notion that it somehow refutes Aristotle. It would take a colossal ignoramus to deny evolution, and yet only a stone’s throw away, we find a thread titled “Is Darwin’s Theory of Evolution True” :roll_eyes: obviously that was intended as a joke by the OP, but many people seem to take it quite seriously… sheesh.
pocaracas said:
I’m still reading so I’ll wait to see how he proposes to solve some problems… oh wait… god-infused souls that have everything built in, right… right… no need to solve anything, just declare it’s solved a-priori.
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You just said you’re still reading. Let’s not jump to conclusions. The book was written deliberately without an appeal to religion - there’s no “soul in the gaps,” no Deus ex machina, none of that. He demonstrates that classical Aristotelian metaphysics DO hold true even now… and let’s keep in mind Aristotle developed his philosophy long before the birth of Jesus. It’s not a Christian brainchild.
 
AIPM1615 said:
It would take a colossal ignoramus to deny evolution, and yet only a stone’s throw away, we find a thread titled “Is Darwin’s Theory of Evolution True” :roll_eyes:
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Part 3, IIRC…
AIPM1615 said:
The book was written deliberately without an appeal to religion - there’s no “soul in the gaps,” no Deus ex machina, none of that. He demonstrates that classical Aristotelian metaphysics DO hold true even now…
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Very well, I’ll keep reading and see how it goes… if it goes there…
AIPM1615 said:
let’s keep in mind Aristotle developed his philosophy long before the birth of Jesus. It’s not a Christian brainchild.
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Surely, you won’t go so far as to say that Aristotle was an atheist… the concepts of gods and souls would have been well known by him, no?
 
pocaracas said:
Part 3, IIRC…
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Yes, and of many more to come, I imagine.
pocaracas said:
Surely, you won’t go so far as to say that Aristotle was an atheist… the concepts of gods and souls would have been well known by him, no?
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Aristotle was not an atheist. He was a monotheist - well aware that the gods of Greek mythology were not really deities at all, nor could they be even in theory. But as for the identity of the true God - it wasn’t clear. In that sense I’d compare his to the deism of Anthony Flew. They both recognized & believed the philosophical implications but did not accept much more than that.

Christian theology, the “Beatific Vision,” all that good stuff was hardly a consideration of his. He didn’t develop his argument for forms (“souls”) based on a Judeo-Christian model (it didn’t exist at that time). I’m not an Aristotelian expert by any means, however my understanding is that he recognized the immaterial human soul without connecting it to some afterlife - a big divergence from the Greek consensus of the era.

Anyway, I’ve got some things to do. Work is calling. 😦 Take care!
 
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Bishop Robert Barron spent an evening at a conference with William Lane Craig, an evangelical Protestant.

“We came together in our emphatic rejection of “scientism,” which is the reduction of all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge, a position that is widely held among young people but that rests upon a fundamental inconsistency. For one could never determine, on scientific grounds, the principle that only scientific knowledge counts as authentic.”
 
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