The history and philosophy of naturalism
Part 3 of this series is here. This post covers Chapter Three on the Limits of Science. Note: “man of science” was the common expression for scientist in Britain until the 20th c. p. 80 – Victorian science saw many dramatic shifts in what counted as “science,” and figures such as Huxley and Maxwell were […]
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Part 2 of this series is here. This post covers the last section of Chapter Two, which is on miracles. I offer some comments of my own at the end. p. 71 – Miracles Building on this reading of uniformity, the scientific naturalists thought they had one attack for which there was no counter. Miracles,
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Part 1 of this series is here. The excerpts below barely do justice to what is in the book. Chapter Two is on the uniformity of natural laws, also called the uniformity of nature. p. 34 – … the assumption that the universe was governed by uninterrupted laws was a fundamental part of natural philosophy.
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Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science by Matthew Stanley (Univ. of Chicago Press, Nov. 2014) is basically the first book to tell the story of how science was redefined in the 19th century. Most people don’t know it even happened and few know how. I bought a copy of this
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It is common to read statements like this: “For the vast majority of biologists, the debate over whether evolution occurs took place in the 19th century and has long been settled — evolution won.” (1) The problem with this statement is that it was not a scientific position that won but a philosophical and political
Mainstream modern science is biased… toward what it calls “primary qualities” (and against other qualities) toward greater and greater extension (and less intension or meaning) toward efficient and material causal factors (and against formal and final ones) toward repeatability (and against the unique) toward positive results (and against negative results) toward the current paradigm (and
Scientific theories are in principle subject to underdetermination in that multiple theories could account for the data. In the natural sciences this possibility is strongly resisted. When Darwin proposed his theory in 1859, he could not show that a version of special creation would not account for the data. What he and Huxley did instead was
A recent meta-analysis on the old question of nature vs. nurture (Meta-Analysis of Twin Correlations and Heritability) concluded that overall the variation of human traits and disease is 49% due to genetic factors and 51% due to environmental factors. There is a similar question about nature vs. culture in anthropology and education. Evolutionary theory is
‘Nature’ is the world conceived without reference to God. A natural rock is a rock as if it exists on its own or as part of a world that exists on its own. It has no absolute origin. Its only ‘origin’ is from other rocks, other existing substances. It is all transformation. This presupposes a
