Freud, Marx and Darwin

Bertvan@aol.com
Tue, 16 Nov 1999 16:37:01 EST

Tom Pearson
.> am regularly puzzled by the use of the term "religion" when I see it
>employed this way. If materialism (or Freudianism, Marxism or Darwinism)
>are "religions," then they are certainly godless ones; at the very least,
>they do not implicate any notion of God in articulating their positive
>positions. This suggests to me that the use of the term "religion" here is
>rather eccentric. It seems to mean something like, "a set of beliefs, held
>by an individual or community, for which there is not sufficient
>evidentiary warrant." In this sense, materialism, ostensibly lacking a
>strict scientific justification, is now cast as a "religion." But this
>renders the definition of "religion" as simply a set of beliefs held by
>some individual or group. If I (and my extended family) believe that my
>oldest son is a genius without peer, then that belief now qualifies as a
>"religion." If someone believes that her colleagues are working behind her
>back to destroy her academic credibility, then that, too, becomes a
>religion. The removal of God as the centerpiece of what is properly
i>dentified as a "religion," and the substitution of any coherent (though
>unsubstantiated) set of personal or collective beliefs in place of God,
>simply re-locates "religion" from the public domain of divine activity to
>the private domain of subjective belief systems. Materialists -- and
>perhaps Freudians, Marxists and Darwinists -- have a metaphysics, but their
>metaphysics does not, in itself, constitute a "religion."

Bertvan
I realize materialists are offended to have their "world view" called a
religion. I should be willing to call it anything they choose. Sometimes
doing so is an "irrestible impulse". I can't help it; weak free will, I
guess. :-)

>It's interesting that you bring up free will in this context, Bertvan.
>There is, of course, far less scientific support for the notion of "free
>will" than there is scientific support for the concept of "evolution."
>Many foks on this list have, for a long time, been pointing out that the
>concept of "evolution" functions within the scientific community as a kind
>of normative inference -- it is one example of an "inference to the best
>explanation." As such, evolution serves to frame scientific research and
>discussion. But there isn't any direct and immediate way (so far as this
>non-scientist knows) to test comprehensively the bundle of inferences that
>comprise "evolution." The same is true of "free will," parfticularly in
>the domain of ethics. It is widely assumed among ethicists that some type
>of "free will" is required for morality to be even possible. So "free
>will" here serves as a prior assumption that makes ethical inquiry
>feasible. But there's no scientific validation of "free will," in the
>sense that there is any obvious evidence for it, or that "free will" could
>be definitively tested. It seems to me that there are parallels here:
>"evolution" is to natural science as "free will" is to ethics. Both
>concepts are posits -- not arbitrary posits, but ones that have grown out
>of a lengthy reflection and investigation on the way the world works. And
>neither concept is inductively validated in any direct way (for that
>matter, I'm not aware that "concepts" can be inductively validated at all).
> Again, both concepts are inferences. So, the upshot is this: I can't
>think of an argument for the conceptual defeasibility of "evolution" that
>doesn't also apply to "free will."

Bertvan:
Neither can I. However, if someone could get the Darwinists to publicly
admit they don't believe in the existence of free will, it might cut off
their funding and hasten their demise.

Tom Pearson