Methodological Naturalism

I'm not talking about the religious form of sceptic. (but that is just a subset of what I am)I'd say that it puts me in very good company indeed.Everyone is, to some degree, a sceptic. You aren't going to tell me that the right approach is to believe everything are you?We all have to have some sort of filters and what we believe easily, what takes a bit of evidence and logic and what we will only believe after being dragged to it kicking and screaming.The question is what filters does one use? How well does one use them? How reliable have the results been for that person in the past?

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Common sense isn't

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Your definition of the supernatural must be "that which does not exist." But unless you are omniscient you are not aware of everything that exists, therefore, how do you determine something is supernatural? I define anything that exists as natural. I see no reason to suspect that intelligent design of any kind requires some supernatural cause.

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Nope, my definition is that for which there is no evidence, no possible way to test or gather evidence, and cannot be falsified either logically or empirically. Thus, concepts such as co-factors in prion pathogenesis (which at present have not been directly detected but merely inferred because of properties of the prion protein that suggest they exist i.e. experimental observation) are natural because one can come up with ways to test and/or falsify their existence. If you make an observation in nature, there are plenty of events/phenomenon which are not explained or observed. But you can begin with the observation to develope testable hypotheses to clarify tentatively how the natural event occurs. In addition, anyone can observe the natural phenomenon. Anyone can do the tests, with a little work and training. How do you test whether Goddidit? How do you falsify Goddidit? If only one person claims he is able to see Goddunit..how do you proceed to construct a scientific hypothesis? If person B says the first person is wrong and it is his gods that did it not the god the first person claimed is responsible, how do you determine which is the better fit to the "hypothesis"? Science does not claim that the supernatural does not exist. But since science is how we describe the natural world, why should science (or how could science) incorporate childrens fairytales, Greek mythology, or non- observable or non-reproducible "personal" beliefs? Also, science i.e. methodological naturalism has produced all scientific discoveries to date while appeals to the supernatural have produced absolutely nothing of scientific value...I see no compelling reason to switch to a system that produces nothing scientifically from one which has produced everything to date.

Loudmouth,You say, Elaborate, please. Both Columbus and Einstein are famous for believing things that others thought impossible. A skeptical mind "just says no." Only with the double negative, "I am skeptical of the idea that what we know is right." does it makes sense.

Holmes,You say, There you go again, confusing yourself with me! I already told you that I believe MN, and use H-D, a subset of MN, to investigate dark matter living beings. Or maybe you were talking about something else.Stephen

Nosyned,You ask, Actually, that's what I try to do. I try to limit my doubts to my doubts. Yes, we are all skeptics. I call it original sin. The H-D method tries to find the truth in every statement, expand on it, and let the mistaken parts just fall by the wayside.Stephen

Holmes,You ask, The man who mentored me, and my grandmother, weren't lost. Francis of Assisi, Mother Teresa, .... Yeshua was the first fruits of those who escape death. Of course, their souls moved out of their bodies.But, I take it the doctors who knew about Semmelweis' hand-washing study, and wrote it off as a Jew trying to promote his religious agenda, who went on going from autopsies to deliveries with child-birth fever on their hands, these guys don't make you angry?Stephen

Yes of course they do.That is why we have to be very careful trusting individual humans. That is why the process of science is set up to try to minimize the opportunities for individual bias's and limitations to mess with the results.Eventually the evidence won out. Maybe, in the worst cases, with the death of those unable to change their minds, but eventually this proved to be exactly why the scientific process has been so very powerful and worked so well. Even in the face of damm fools!

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Common sense isn't

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There you go again, confusing yourself with me! I already told you that I believe MN, and use H-D, a subset of MN, to investigate dark matter living beings.

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Ad hominem won't get you anywhere in this case. Do I really need to repost your own quotes concerning how those who use MN are dogmatists never getting to the truth?Besides, what I was reacting to was your statement that a love believes all things, yet you do not believe what physicists say about dark matter/energy, nor what doctors say about mental illness, nor what anthropologists say about cargo cults, nor what... etc etc etc

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

Holmes,You say, Hey, what about cargo cults? You were going to fill me in.As to MN, I thought it dis-allowed study of stuff that couldn't be directly detected, but had to be understood through its affect on stuff we could see. You straightened my out on that, and I changed my mind.Stephen

Mammuthus<< Nope, my definition is that for which there is no evidence, no possible way to test or gather evidence, and cannot be falsified either logically or empirically. >>Well, this doesn't apply to ID. The hypothesis that the first cells were products of advanced bioengineering doesn't require the postulation of any extra-natural mechanisms and is amenable to the scientific method.[This message has been edited by Warren, 01-21-2004]

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The man who mentored me, and my grandmother, weren't lost. Francis of Assisi, Mother Teresa, .... Yeshua was the first fruits of those who escape death. Of course, their souls moved out of their bodies.

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You and I were talking about physical lives and you know it.If it was about "souls" the same would hold true for atheists as well. The only question is where the souls of sceptics end up. Now for my money, if there are souls, it's reincarnation according to buddhist paradigms.Tell me how I can differentiate between the two? All experiments you have listed would hold for buddhist paradisms as well. If you know the tenets of buddhism, it would not even matter that you prayed to Jesus to see your results. And it explains why the prayers of other religions also appear to be answered (which yoru paradigm does not).

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But, I take it the doctors who knew about Semmelweis' hand-washing study, and wrote it off as a Jew trying to promote his religious agenda, who went on going from autopsies to deliveries with child-birth fever on their hands, these guys don't make you angry?

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While I care about the "sluts" you thought "good-riddance" to, I was less angered by the doctors which defied Semmelweis, than depressed. It goes to show how rigid people can be in the face of evidence, in order to hang on to their own ideas of the world.While Semmelweis's theory may not have made much sense without further investigation, it certainly bore further investigation. And in any case it was a practice which (regardless of theoretical knowledge of why it worked) did produce positive results. The doctors also appeared to have defied historical knowledge of dressing wounds that promoted cleansing areas, which made their own position even more incredible.Either way you seem to miss the point of the story. It was not MN which kept Semmelweis's theory/practice down. It was the bigotry of men which kept them from applying MN based research to his techniques.You are asking others to throw away MN as the stringent tool for accumulating knowledge. That is the intellectual equivalent of having learned handwashing saves lives, and then disregarding it because the Bible doesn't say you have to.MN has developed through time by the fruits of its use, and the rotten fruit of disregarding its techniques. Semmelweis is an example of it working in the end.Why you feel you must resist, and badmouth MN in trying to research your own claims I do not know. While you portray yourself as Semmelweis, you act as the other doctors and fling bigotry at atheists and other scientists, saying that we should not bring our inspections to bear on your work because it is tainted with our "faith".If your theories are so right, why not use Methodological Naturalism to support them? It was good enough to prove Semmelweis correct.I do want to add one further point. Semmelweis postulated physical entities too small to be seen with the naked eye. That is a far cry from postulating nonmaterial entities, which do not obey physical laws, as a cause.If your H-D was used, one could have at the time explained that there were no germs at all and just demons, and as we all know demons are afraid of water (especially vampires) and so that is why hand washing works. Even baptisms use water on the nonwounded, to clean the soul. And thus if held as the standard even today we could have never explored the miscroscopic world and understood that it was minute biological entities, instead of "darkmatter" at work in patients. H-D is that good.As it is some people still claim that it is evil entities that rule infection and health of the patient, instead of physical causes. Should you not support their beliefs over Semmelweis? If not, why not?

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

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Hey, what about cargo cults? You were going to fill me in.

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Check your thread on best methods. I "filled you in" yesterday and still have some outstanding questions to be answered.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

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Elaborate, please. Both Columbus and Einstein are famous for believing things that others thought impossible. A skeptical mind "just says no." Only with the double negative, "I am skeptical of the idea that what we know is right." does it makes sense.

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Columbus was skeptical of the impossibility of a western passage to India. He just happened to stumble on to another continent, but that's beside the point. Einstein was skeptical of the explanatory power of Newton's laws with respect to physics. His laws of relativity added to our knowledge. Just a few more examples, Koch was skeptical of evil humors as the cause of disease, Pasteur was skeptical of spontaneous generation, and Galileo was skeptical of geocentrism. Their skepticism has added to our current understanding of our world and shifted paradigms among the "unquestioning" masses. Ask the "unquestioning" why they believe that the Earth orbits the sun and they will answer "That's what I was taught," not "Galileo's models and Newton's Laws of Gravity are well evidenced and support observed phenomena."

Holmes,Why do you keep saying this? As defined, MN is a good idea. Dogmatically opinionated people who mis-use MN to hide from the truth, and dogmatic opinionation itself, are bad.Stephen

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As defined, MN is a good idea.

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This is one of the reasons I keep saying what I do. It is not just a good idea, it is the best practice we have when moving from observation to statements of knowledge.While I have already stated that HD (hypothetic-deductive) can work as a starting point, the clean up job must be through thorough analysis under MN (methodological naturalism) protocols. Otherwise one is prone to error, or will be forced to reinvent MN as one deals with varied experimental results.If I have changed your mind, and you believe the above, then I'll stop pressing my point. Otherwise you are badmouthing MN (discrediting it), in order to prop up a weaker form of knowledge building.

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Dogmatically opinionated people who mis-use MN to hide from the truth, and dogmatic opinionation itself, are bad.

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This I agree with. But you do appear to be dogmatic in holding onto results of H-D, and dismissing those who point out they are not rigorous enough to pass muster (as they are currently handled) with MN. It's not that they never could, just that they certainly aren't in their current form.The movement to remove good science is gaining ground in the US. I find any attempts to replace it, without some good evidence to support new methods, as a foe that must be fought firmly.I certainly don't mind people toying with fringes of knowledge, and speculating on alternate realities which might underlay the conventional models we have right now. But when a part of that research demands never using our tightest methods, and furthermor then says its results (which can only be had if our best methods are never used) prove that we shouldn't use our best methods... that is going too far. It is careless, and makes the public prone to weak science and hucksterism.If another methodology works, its results must be able to stand up under our existing best method. As I have shown H-D could very well have discredited Semmelweis's theories, just as you have (using H-D) discredited anthropological theories that religion is a manifestation of humans trying to describe phenomena they do not understand. It is the weakness in inaccurately assessing the former, which is why I do not think it is valid to apply the latter. It is not a strong enough filter. Other, weaker, theories get by.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)