Reply #80: You didn't understand my post at all [View All]

[Stunster]

Your assumption that there are things we cannot know because we cannot sense them is a logically fallacy in itself. The list of things we know now and yet cannot sense personally is impossibly huge.

I never made that assumption. So your next paragraph is also beside the point. I am in no way criticizing science in any part of my post. I am criticizing the scientifically unwarranted belief that only science can yield genuine knowledge about reality. That belief is not itself a part of science, yet it is routinely trotted out by atheists as if it were a scientifically established fact, which simply demonstrates their philosophical illiteracy.

I am well aware that science isn't a competitor to theism. I think you should direct your advice on that score to atheists, since they are far more typically guilty of making that mistake.

In philosophy, scientism, materialism, and naturalism are routinely distinguished from science. Philosophers can see that they are not science, but philosophical positions. I am not criticizing science. I am criticizing those philosophical positions. And that is relevant to atheism, because a lot of atheists are atheists because they adopt those philosophical positions. If the argument between theism and atheism could be decided by empirical science, then the issue would be different. But, as I pointed out, if the issue is whether there exists a reality that cannot be detected even in principle by empirical science, then citing the fact that it's not detectable by empirical science is irrelevant---unless you can demonstrate that everything real must be so detectable. And that's not the sort of thing that even can be demonstrated by empirical science.

Most of philosophy is really about whether materialism can possibly be true. Trying to give adequate, convincing materialist accounts of

1) mathematics

2) logic

3) rationality in general

4) the nature of thought

5) the phenomenal properties of perception

6) the phenomenal properties of sensation

7) knowledge

8) meaning

9) free will

10) morality

11) aesthetic value

12) consciousness in general

13) the laws of nature

and even of

14) material objects themselves

has proved an arduous task, and there is no consensus that it has been, even remotely, successfully accomplished or even has any prospect of success.

Notice how important the items mentioned on this list are to daily human living. The average person usually doesn't think of any of them, except 14, in materialist terms. And ever since Berkeley, there have been serious doubts levelled about materialist understandings of material objects---giving rise to various forms of phenomenalism (even among non-theists such as Russell and Ayer, as well as the in whole phenomenological tradition of Continental philosophy). So when atheists say that nearly all of us nearly all the time think and act as though materialism is true, I say, "WTF?". Materialism didn't even become a widely held belief until the 19th century. And it has taken a few hard blows in the 20th century, not least from science itself (an enjoyable account is THE MATTER MYTH by Paul Davies and John Gribbin, the first chapter of which is entitled 'The Death of Materialism').

On some interpretations of quantum mechanics, consciousness is invoked to 'collapse the wave-function' and thus generate the stable world of material objects that we seem to see. How ironic that materialism's fundamental science---physics---might need to be supplemented by a component of consciousness (which philosophers such as Chalmers and McGinn have argued is either ontologically or epistemologically irreducible to the material).

I point all this out not to declare adherence to any particular philosophical theory or any particular interpretation of quantum physics, but merely to show how extraordinarily controverted all these issues are. Yet most atheist arguments presuppose that materialism is true, or suggest that it's 'obviously' true. To which my response is, :eyes:

None of this of course is a criticism of science itself. That would be like thinking that a materialist who was trying to give a materialist account of morality was criticizing morality. No, that's just a category mistake.