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If I can single out a defining moment when I became a skeptic, that was the one.
That changed in the fall of 1995, when I landed a job at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. As soon as I arrived on campus, freshly appointed Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, an amazing thing happened: the Tennessee legislature, in its infinite lack of wisdom, thought it an appropriate time to discuss a new anti-evolution law, as if the Scopes trial never happened.
The cornerstone of empiricism is that the best way to learn about the world is to observe it, i.e. to collect data.
Furthermore, Kant observed that a great deal of what we perceive about the world (empiricism) is in fact shaped by our minds (rationalism). The generalization of the latter statement led him to the philosophy of idealism, which is as far as you can get from modern science.
Appropriately enough, the word “skepticism” comes from a Greek root which means “seeking,” presumably the truth.
A more modern way to think about skepticism is in scientific-statistical terms, as probabilities to commit one of two fundamental types of errors: rejecting conclusions that are in fact correct (extreme skepticism) or accepting conclusions that are false (extreme gullibility). We will see in Chapter 4 why a good compromise is not along the 50%-50% line.
As much as the Renaissance and humanism marked the beginning of the modern era, and therefore the ascent of science, humanism cannot really be considered a philosophy of knowledge, but rather an attitude about the world that proclaims human uniqueness and value.
Contrary to popular understanding, an atheist is not someone who believes that there is no God, but rather one who lacks a belief in God (a-theism, without a God).
Naturalism is for all effective purposes the same as materialism. The latter – far from the negative connotation that it has acquired because of its spurious relationship with Marxism – is the idea that existence is entirely physical (i.e., there is no metaphysical world). Therefore, all our sensations, including the mental processes through which we acquire knowledge, are based on physical properties of our brains (with all the powers and shortcomings that this implies).
The best response I have ever come across is one given by Bertrand Russell, who said that he wished that people questioning reality would get into a car and drive straight into a wall at a speed proportional to their belief that the wall is not real.
Realism states that there are universals that exist independently of our minds.
The fundamentals of the freethought movement are three: the use of logical-empirical means to establish conclusions about the nature of the world; a general principle of tolerance toward the possibly disparate conclusions to which this method can lead human beings; and a partiality to humans as the subjective, not objective, center of our world.
There are two main ways of proceeding “logically” to acquire knowledge about the world: deduction and induction. Deduction is the process by which one starts with a number of assumptions and reaches a logically necessary (that is, internally consistent) conclusion from those assumptions.
Induction, on the other hand, is a method of inferring generalizations from the observations of many instances of particular occurrences.
Induction was canonized as part of the nascent scientific method by Francis Bacon (1561-1626).
Induction, on the other hand, is prone to error if the conditions that generated a given outcome in the past are significantly altered (in other words, induction can only tell us what will probably occur).
“Question with boldness even the existence of God.” (Thomas Jefferson, letter to his favorite nephew, 10 August 1787)
In fact, I would go much further than that: science cannot prove the non-existence of anything at all. All scientists can do is to support positive statements with circumstantial evidence (Lakatos 1974), or disprove them by refutation (Popper 1968). So, we are left with the rather unsatisfactory position that science throws a little bit of light in the abyss of the unknown, but not enough to answer perhaps the most important philosophical question of them all: is there something beyond matter and energy?
In fact, there are even more strict limits on what science can do. These limits derive from the indispensability of falsifiable hypotheses (not always easy to formulate), and from the necessity of enough empirical evidence to actually test such hypotheses. For example, in the case of the origin of life (Chapter 12), or the origin of the universe itself, the questions may be scientifically approachable, and it certainly is possible to derive falsifiable alternative hypotheses. However, we may never have sufficient data to actually test and reject (or provisionally accept) some of the hypotheses
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Science is not about proving things; it is about constructing workable causal models of reality.
Should we conclusively determine that the probability of existence of our universe is infinitesimally small, and should we fail to explain why physical constants have assumed the quantities that we observe, the possibility of a designed universe would have to be seriously considered.
In other words, it is a characteristic of the scientific method to reject explanations based on unnecessary hypotheses, as well as hypotheses that carry no explanatory power.
The distinction between methodological and philosophical naturalism, therefore, misses one important component of the scientific method: science is an enterprise based on (reasonable) philosophical assumptions, not just a collection of facts.
“person set up to serve as a cover for a usually questionable transaction.”
De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium
Johannes Kepler who, in 1609, published Astronomia Nova.
The notion was that past events are explainable in terms of the same processes seen in action today, in a sort of cautious back-extrapolation.
Many paleontologists have accepted this scale-dependent compromise because otherwise it is hard to find a known evolutionary mechanism that would cause really rapid evolutionary change (i.e., almost instantaneous).
In other words, the behavior in question may be due not only to somewhat separable genetic and environmental components, but also to a degree of interdependence between the two.
The existence of so-called “genotype-environment interactions” undermines both straw man positions. If indeed the interaction is what is most prevalent (as seems to be the case: Pigliucci 2001), then either extreme does not make sense and should be rejected.
If you wish, this same relationship exists between a map and the territory that the map is supposed to represent. If you make the map too simple, you will miss many fundamental aspects of the area you are interested in. On the other hand, you cannot make the map as detailed as the entire territory actually is, because you would need a map as large and complex as the real thing, which would take away the whole point of any model: achieving a reasonable (and useful) simplification of a complex problem.
My general contention is that a theory that is fuzzy enough to allow for too much waffling and compromise (i.e., it cannot be characterized by a straw man) lacks an identifiable hard core. As a consequence, it is not a scientific theory, and it does not permit us to make any progress in our understanding of the universe. Think about that the next time that someone is accusing you of making a straw man of his views.
