Re: Question: Philosophy of Science - is it Relevant?


"Perplexed in Peoria" <jimmenegay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
>
> A final comment regarding "Ruse demonstrates that there is no
> necessary conflict between Christianity and evolutionism":
>
> In my experience, philosophers don't really 'demonstrate' things.
> Instead, they construct rationalizations of intellectual positions
> which may sometimes help to clarify the issues.
>
Researchers don't know what they are going to find. When they don't know
what they are doing either, we start calling them philosophers. Philosophy
has made huge progress since the discovery of root two blew the
"proportions" theory out of the water, but the quality of the discipline
changes as you move from discussing evidence that is easily obtained, but
not knowing what it means, as in current linguistics, to a very narrow and
very sophisticated analysis of a field which is broadly understood, as in
modern genetics.

The question you raise is a good one. When I was a little boy just beginning
to understand politics, I didn't like Margaret Thatcher. She came over as
aggressive, in constrast to the reasonable James Callahagan. I said this to
my father, who replied that our family was Conservative and Labour was bad
for the country. I switched allegiance. Thirty years later, I still believe
that my father was basically in the right. However am I just constructing an
elaborate justification based on freemarket economics, unions, and
government spending policies, when in fact my real motive is a primitive
identification with the family's tribal allies?
>
> Ruse's discussion
> of compatibility between Christianity and Evolutionism strikes me
> as very unconvincing.
>
The first point is that most reasonably well-informed people think that the
science / religion conflict is a relatively new one. In fact St Augustine,
in the fifth century, regarded the creation account in Genesis as
incompatible with science. His reason was that a creation in seven phases
was incompatible with a universe composed of mutally opposed elements,
because the psitive demands the simulatnaeous appearance of its negative.
His resolution of the conflict was to scold Christians who demanded a
literal interpreation as bringing the religion into intellectual disrepute.
>
> ISTM that he has a distorted picture of
> the core Christian beliefs, and perhaps also of the core evolutionist
> beliefs. All three great monotheistic religions have at their core
> the doctrine that God works in history - particularly human history.
> Evolutionism has as its core belief that God does not guide history.
>
Evolutionism states that the commonsense theory that animals must have been
placed individually on the Earth by God is wrong. In common with the rest of
science, it doesn't look for divine intervention. You can believe that God
tweaked a butterfly's wings somewhere in the Amazon to avoid a storm which
would have washed away Lucy's leaf shelter and led to hominids becoming
extinct, if you wish. Evolutionary biology doesn't have anything special to
say on such a matter.

The real strength of the scientific atheist case is that, in all cases where
a divine explanation for phenomena has been seriously proposed, it has
eventually been proved to be wrong. So it is a natural conclusion that for
those phenomena where the issue is still open - notably the origin of the
universe and the nature of the human mind - the theistic explanations will
also prove to be wrong.
>
> Any accomodation between these two ideologies must do some violence
> to one or the other. ISTM that Ruse had to do some pretty radical
> surgery on Christianity to construct his rationalization. In this
> case, the philosopher's work did little to clarify the issues, IMHO.
>
I think there are two fallacies going. The first is that fundamentalist
Christianity is authentic Christianity, and liberal Christians have chopped
and changed to accomodate science into their worldview. In fact it is
fundamentalism which is the modern phenomenon. It makes little sense without
cheap printing and a society in which it is practical to choose one's
religion, for example, conditions which most of humanity has not
experienced. The second fallacy is that "theism" is "Deism", and that the
Christian God is the Deist God with a few unimportant bells and whistles
added on. In fact as you say the Christian God acts through history, and
history is made by the actions of men, and we don't know whether a theistic
or a non-theist explanation for human behaviour will turn out to be right.

Then real challenge that evolutionary biology poses for Christianity is when
it tries to give adaptive explanations for human behaviour. Here creationism
is still academically respectable, and it comes from the left rather than
from the right. However this is surprising. Marx said that what we regard as
morality is in fact largely self-serving class interest. Jesus said pretty
much the same thing. Before you see a conflict between evolutionary biology
and either of these thinkers, you first need to look again at what they
actually believed.



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