Is it a whole week since I recommended the Youtube channel of the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder? I don't understand why you object to my point that when you make the rules of how you are to look for something, excluding types of explanations of things, that when you come to your conclusions, you can't rationally claim that the results you got with your exclusionary methods are useful to reason back as to make statements from your conclusion about the thing you excluded.
If you exclude considerations of God in your method, a. what you find will only tell you about things you could find without considering God, b. those things you do find cannot, then, lead you to any rationally coherent statement about God. C. The findings of physics, made under those rules, should not find anything about God anymore than they should which political candidate to vote for. They might inform your thinking about those things but they cannot, unaided by a far wider consideration of experience, get you to an answer of questions outside of their formal discourse. I think I was fairly clear in stating that last Monday.
Another is contained in her repetition of the contention that belief in God is not warranted because God is "not necessary" for the findings of physics. There are any number of problems with that claim, not least of which is that science, including physics, is a human construct which formally excludes consideration of the question of God just as it excludes consideration of questions of morality. When you start out that way, by excluding things, it is no great surprise when your chosen method cannot support the contention that those things are real or true - even as you formally proclaim that reality or truth are not the things you are trying to establish. She does both in the course of her videos, makes those true statements about the formal intentions of science but she, then, also tries to use them to debunk the existence of God.
And I do think it was an apt point to make after pointing out that the ideology of so many scientist-atheist-materialists, scientism, that science is the exclusive method of finding the truth, expressed by that major figure in all three, the logician Bertrand Russell, in the logically incoherent claim "What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know." Well, science cannot tell you that so it is a matter of his faith, not science. You wonder why he either didn't get that glaringly obvious problem with his statement or why, getting it, he said it anyway.
It is exactly like the dangerous stupidity in the biological and life sciences of claiming to look for the existence of moral absolutes with the agreed-to, socially constructed methods of science when those methods, by agreement, exclude questions of morality. It doesn't mean that those don't exist, it means your methodology, excluding those from the start, failing to find them, cannot then claim that they aren't there though that claim will get the support of those who didn't want to find them, anyway. Any "morality" you find or discover or discuss under the reigning orthodox framing of biology will carry the distinct and controlling character of the doctrine of natural selection, lots of people will end up getting killed or dying of neglect.
If you don't think that's a dangerous practice, you should read the behavioral science of the Nazis, of the Darwinists and of their modern manifestation in contemporary, university based and book tour supported "ethics" which seems to me to be little more than engaged in making lists of who it is "ethical" to kill or to let die or to languish in misery out of questions of economic utility to those who have control of wealth. Economists who play biologists are some of the worst, as can be seen in the influence of Richard A. Epstein, the Hoover Institute - New York University Law School on the Trump non-policy of dealing with our present pandemic. His reasoning in supporting his credibility in something which he clearly has no credibility in (as can be seen from the actual results as compared to his projections) plays on just that question of what you get depending on what your beginning rules of research include.
No, look, I’m not an empiricist, but, again, let me just be clear to you, because you’re much too skeptical. The evolutionary component has not been taken into account in these models, and so before one is so dismissive, what you really need to do is to get somebody who’s an expert on this stuff to look at the evolutionary theory and explain why a principle of natural selection doesn’t apply here.
What I’m doing here is nothing exotic. I’m taking standard Darwinian economics—standard economic-evolutionary theory out of Darwin—and applying it to this particular case. And, if that’s wrong, somebody should tell me. But what happens is I just get these letters from people saying, “You’re not an expert. The H1 virus differs from this one in the following way.” What I don’t get from anybody is a systematic refutation which looks at the points parameter by parameter.
In this case he was whining because the results he liked aren't the results you get if you start out with the ground rules experts in epidemiology have experience of knowing work to make predictions that work based on experience. That anyone would believe someone with Epstein's CV would have more credibility than Dr. Fauci is certainly not a matter of rational consideration.
I would think it's worth thinking about the extent to which morality is a tacitly acknowledged framing under which epidemiologists are motivated to do their work as opposed to libertarian law professors playing biologist. I have, repeatedly, discussed the wider framing of Darwinism as based in the class interests of Darwin and the adopters of his theory of natural selection which is his own adaptation of the pathologically amoral class-based economics theory of the notorious Thomas Malthus, who certainly excluded the Gospel of Jesus from economics which are a total and complete inversion of it. He did that though his "living" was as the parson of an Anglican church, which at that period was about as much a guarantee of taking the teachings of Jesus as true as a hack libertarian law prof who is part of the Hoover gang taking them seriously true in 2020.
--------------
As I said, I admire much of Sabine Hossenfelder's skepticism of the scene in physics and cosmology of the past 40 years even as she is a figure within that scene. I think the questions she and others like her, such as Peter Woit, are important. But I think they generally miss the point I'm trying to make here. You cannot use science to engage with questions concerning the truth or falseness of the reality of God, or the truth of God's existence because the rules of science exclude those.
More seriously, for science, the study of physical reality, to ignore the problem that your ground rules will exclude not only possible realities that cannot be found through them but in even addressing matters you have excluded from your study before you even start, is a serious oversight of scientists. And those exclusions are as often a matter of cultural hegemony as anything else. If you start out with rejecting the possibility that the universe is not eternal but had an absolute beginning, you get things like the editor of Nature magazine railing against the possibility of the Big Bang as late as the 1990s on purely ideological grounds. You get the refusal to look at the rigorous research into parapsychology - the most rigorously controlled, criticized, corrected, (yet getting persisting positive results) research into human minds currently available EVEN AS SCIENCE ACCEPTED EVEN THE HUGE PERCENTAGE OF QUESTIONABLE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLAP TRAP INCLUDING THAT ENORMOUS MAJORITY OF IT WHICH COULD NOT BE REPLICATED - on the a priori ideology of materialists that it can't be true. Yet those incredibly highly controlled, critisized, analyzed AND REPLICATED experiments continue to yield not only strong statistical evidence of the phenomena studied, but very strong statistical evidence of it.
If life came about and evolved by the intent of God, if, in fact, the "fine tuning" of our one and only universe is a result of the same intent, then science as conducted under its classical and present rules could not possibly find those realities because their rules would exclude what you would need to know to find that. That is even if the goal of science, informing human minds of such things, can find those truths. It's not outside of the realm of possibility that that is among the "laws" that Eddington said may be outside of the capacity of human beings to understand using the means of understanding available to us. I'm tempted to give the many instances in which the Jewish scriptures inform us that we should expect such inability when it comes to the ultimate question of God.
Science is not capable of telling us why the universe is the way it is, it can tell you things that come after that, why, within the way things are things happen, it cannot go back before that starts and tell you why things are the way they are. It can't even tell you if there is a why involved. And there is much about the physical universe of our experience that it is probably if not certainly incapable of telling us. It cannot tell us if all of that experience is bounded within those things explainable by physics, though that everything could be reduced to the rules of physics is certainly one of the undemonstrated controlling faiths of the ideology of materialism. I would suspect that was the article of faith that led Russell to make his logically, self-internally irrational claim about the power of science to reveal the entirety of reality to human beings.
Even if they could tell you how the first organism, in the realm of improbabilities far higher than the improbabilities of cosmology, formed by random-chance, it couldn't tell you why things were as they were to allow the conditions under which random-chance could have allowed for that possibility or why, given that incredible probability our planet has life instead of no life, which would have been the probable outcome in every alternative scenario that science can possibly address. Yet atheist-materialists and, especially, those devoted to scientism constantly address the question of the "necessity of God" for the results found with a methodology that excludes God. You wonder if a scientific method that included God would be useful for excluding God. Though it wouldn't be the same thing. I wonder how well it would work for the human purposes science was invented to serve.
--------
I was curious about my title, googling "geiger counter good cup of coffee" and found that scientists are about as concerned with coffee drinking as I am in the morning when I write most of my posts. Many of them said coffee was missing from the hit.
Other than that there was a site that claimed you could turn a Mr. Coffee into a geiger counter. Which seems just wrong to me, using a coffee maker for some other purpose. Just wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment