"Freshman Philosophy Bull Shit" - Hate Mail

It doesn't matter in the slightest that the fact I pointed out is extremely inconvenient for the classical claim of scientists that their experiments demonstrate what would happen without conscious intention intervening as the classical materialists claim is the case, any experiment done by any human being, one done badly or one done well cannot demonstrate that what they did can happen without divine intent.  

Their observations of nature, itself, cannot demonstrate that because according to the monotheistic assertion that God not only created the heavens and the earth but that God created them at all levels of magnification and in all of its movements and governing all of its events.  The "regular processes of nature" are certainly more than merely covered by that assertion, so would those which the scientists routinely throw out as "outliers" in their data so as to not have to deal with such inconvenient deviations from their observations and to make their tabulation and number crunching easier and tidier for publication.  I've wondered how scientists really explain how their often quite attenuated claims about revealing the regular workings of nature comports with the fact that they sometimes throw out quite a bit of data on that basis.  I wonder how big that percentage of the disused data is allowed to get before they start to figure that they're throwing quite a bit of the actual "processes of nature" on to that scrap heap of intellectual convenience, not to be mentioned or admitted to.  I mean, if it is actually what happened once, that it doesn't fit into their planned scheme doesn't make it go away. 

Literally nothing that science can do can demonstrate that God's intention is absent from nature on the basis of an absence of conscious intent in their evaluation of it because no matter what they do, they cannot escape the role that their own conscious intent impinges on their misnamed "objective" conclusions.  As A. S. Eddington pointed out, modern science leaving out the issue of the mind of God is not much more than an accountant leaving it out of their book keeping columns.  It's a human convenience - I'd add a reflection on our inability to keep things straight if they get too complex.  

I do think that Rupert Sheldrake was on to something important when he noted that British scientists are philosophically ignorant as compared to many of those on the European continent, perhaps elsewhere, as well.  I think that British bad habit is shared by quite a lot of Americans, especially after the pseudo-skeptics - it would be more accurate to call them what they are, atheist ideologues - started asserting themselves in the post-war period.   It was something that was noted in the criticism of the American physicists by Paul Feyerabend

The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Mach, and so on.  But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth.

But that's not true of all English speaking scientists,  

Horgan: Krauss, Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson have been bashing philosophy as a waste of time. Do you agree?

Ellis: If they really believe this they should stop indulging in low-grade philosophy in their own writings. You cannot do physics or cosmology without an assumed philosophical basis. You can choose not to think about that basis: it will still be there as an unexamined foundation of what you do. The fact you are unwilling to examine the philosophical foundations of what you do does not mean those foundations are not there; it just means they are unexamined.

Actually philosophical speculations have led to a great deal of good science. Einstein’s musings on Mach’s principle played a key role in developing general relativity. Einstein’s debate with Bohr and the EPR paper have led to a great of deal of good physics testing the foundations of quantum physics. My own examination of the Copernican principle in cosmology has led to exploration of some great observational tests of spatial homogeneity that have turned an untested philosophical assumption into a testable – and indeed tested - scientific hypothesis. That’s good science.

Note:  I put up the comments again the night, before last keeping them off a couple of days seems to have gotten rid of the spam bot filling up the pending comments box.  Hate mail comes in and most of it goes right to the spam file.  I don't feel any need to post it here but that doesn't mean I won't use what gets thrown at me.