Hello Jon,
Thank you for trying to help move this thread forward. The original point was simply to challenge Dick on his definition of 'science,' with which I disagree. That's all. The rest is a response that shows why it has become so difficult for me to continue dialoguing at ASA when only a few people are familiar with the line of argument.
"Causes have to be natural to qualify as science, that's all." - Dick Fischer
With this I disagree because the defintion excludes (or at least doesn't include) many disciplines in the contemporary academy that study 'non-natural' things. Thus, his definition is faulty. And when asked about those 'other' disciplines,' instead of responding directly, he retreated into a classical theological position "natural as opposed to supernatural." To me, that is incomplete, unsatisfying and in a certain way an attempt to 'silence' those disciplines that I mentioned. Entirely unacceptable for contemporary academic discourse, that includes theology, but cannot allow it to dominate given the specter of pluralism and de-hierarchializaion of the classical-contemporary map of knowledge.
Anyone who dumps all human activities into the category of 'natural' is simply showing their lack of understanding of human-social science and scholarship and the advancement made in social-philosophical knowledge in the past hundred plus years.
I have listed things three or four times already on the ASA list things that are considered as opposites of 'natural' besides 'supernatural.' These include 'cultural,' 'social,' 'political' and 'economic'. To speak about any of these things as if they are simply outcomes of 'human nature' is to challenge the entire edifice upon which 'human nature' is understood within human-social thought. One thus needs to be more careful about how they organize their claim to 'science.' I have found geographers, especially human geographers, helpful in distinguishing 'nature' from other things that are 'not-natural.' Would you consider geography a natural science or a social-humanitarian science? Well, the last twenty or so years of developments in human geography have gone far to show how the split between natural science and human-social science is not so clearly or easily maintained after all.
The problem, of course, is in people's different definitions of 'nature' and what it includes and doesn't. For me, when a natural scientist (or theologian) sweepingly includes all human action as 'natural' it is obvious they have not come into contact with entire traditions of scholarship that deny this is so. In fact, the problem runs deeper because the view that all human action can be called 'natural' actually supports socio-biologists and evolutionary psychologists and other naturalistic philosophers such as E.O. Wilson, J.M. Smith, R. Trivers, D. Dennett, P. Singer, J. Tooby and L. Cosmides, and Pascal Boyer (included below is a text from Boyer's "Why is Religion Natural?").
Do ASA list participants want to be lumped in with those persons as to their view on what is 'natural' and what isn't, specifically when it comes to discoussions of human beings? My guess is probably no. Yet that is how it appears from such a position as Dick, George and a few others on the ASA list have taken (Please note - I am referring specifically to the position that human beings are 'entirely natural' and unequivocably NOT suggesting Dick or George support Dawkins, Dennett, Pinker and the 'Brights'' views). Thus, I hope not to have misrepresented them. Do they think that religion is purely a 'natural' thing, or that it is a mix of cultural, social, political and economic factors, among others, not excluding the supernatural, which is more 'super' than them all?
The statement: "Causes have to be natural to qualify as science, that's all," is a simple caricature of the truth, nothing more than an introduction to deeper topics.
Thank you Jon, but I didn't want to speak about ID in this thread. There are many other threads that have discussed ID. However, that said, now that you raise the topic, let me say that I agree for the most part with your assessment.
Jon Tandy wrote:
"If ID supporters really believed creation came about from the influence of any of a variety of "intelligent agents" which were potentially not supernatural, this might be a true statement. However, if the published ID concept of "intelligent agent" is really a euphemism for "God" in order to make it potentially acceptable in scientific circles, then I'm not certain your statement is a correct perception of the contribution of ID. I'm not saying there isn't potentially a contribution, but I don't think they have necessarily helped construct a third alternative to "natural" or "supernatural", unless you allow for alien or human Creators, which they don't in their heart of hearts."
I think what we'll find is that 'intelligent design' will escape from the box that the IDM leaders have carefully/rhetorically/even propagandically built for 'ID' (lower-case, upper-case mixture, when speaking in different venues). It is not that I necessarily think that most ID proponents don't think 'intelligent agent' is really a euphemism for 'God,' but that there are ID proponents who don't think so, and they are perhaps more important for assessing the 'science' and 'mathematics' put forth by Dembski, Behe, Gonzales, etc. simply because they are obviously not influenced by the religious discourse. If one of them were to visit ASA list, you'd find a very different conversation than usual here. Yes, the possibility of an 'intelligent design' theory in social-humanitarian thought is actual, though it would not look much like what the first generation of IDists, a.k.a. the IDM, conceived it to be.
Speaking about 'intelligent agents' is simply problematic for most natural scientists, full stop. At least it is for those who don't study animals or conscious entities. It is generally a taken for granted assumption in human-social sciences that human beings are intelligent agents and that we 'design' things. This brings us immediately back to the importance of the relationship between human-social sciences and natural sciences, and also with and between philosophy and theology. And this is where philosophers of science and social-humantarian thinkers are far more prepared to dialogue with knowledge of the literatures that have built up on the topic of 'agency' than natural scientists. Agents, actors and even 'actants' have long been discussed in the human-social sciences, however their meaning is unlike what the IDM is proposing.
By allowing the discourse of what counts as 'science' and what counts as 'evolution' to be highjacked, hegemonically disallowing alternative views to the 'natural'/'supernatural' dichotomy, the end of the discussion is sealed before discussion can begin. It is pure privileging of discourse at its most blatant and (in this case, unfortunately) absurd. Again, natural scientists (and I speak amicably about them/you for the most part) don't often tune into the significance of the discussion (e.g. Dick's dismissiveness about - paraphrase - 'if you people want to stay up nights talking about this stuff...') because they are so specialised in their narrow regions of expertise and out of touch with the wider dialogues of over-lapping sciences, multiple sciences, poly-paradigms and plural scientific methods. The integration of human-social sciences in a new era of academic and non-academic discovery seems to have passed them by without notice.
We are in agreement, Jon, that "I don't think they have necessarily helped construct a third alternative to "natural" or "supernatural"," and this is mainly because they don't have the right mix of scientists and scholars to do it. The have biologists, chemists, information theorists, engineers galore, historians and philosophers of science, legal studies, jurisprdence, cosmology, and theology, but little in the way of social-humanitarian thought. They have not answered the HUGE question about the difference between human-made things and non-human-made things, though Dembski half-heartedly attempted to do this in the Appendix to "Intelligent Design: The BRIDGE" (1999). I have made no secret of challenging the IDM on this problem, yet remain without a satisfactory answer.
In my opinion, which it seems you entirely agree with, Jon, 'they' (i.e. the IDM) have not yet succeeded in bridging either the natural sciences, particularly biology, with theology. Perhaps more importantly, they have failed to bridge the natural sciences and the social-humanitarian sciences. You see, a larger argument behind the surface-demarcation discussion with Dick about his naturalistic definition of 'science' is the fact that social-humanitarian science and scholarship has been mainly left out of the ID, creation, evolution discourse. Origins and processes of change are apparently owned (McDonald's-like) by natural scientists. Social-humanitarian scientists have thus far been quiet, or have not found welcome avenues to express what they have to say.
And yet if anyone takes even a moment to verify the record, inspect the literature, check out the grammar, evolutionary theory is even more prolific in social-humanitaran thought than it is in natural science! This is because evolutionary theory can only be applied to specialized, narrow fields of natural science with practical usage and effects and as an over-arching grand narative about the natural history of the Earth and everything on it and in it. Evolutionary theory is not even necessary for a large portion of active biologists working today, though this doesn't mean they don't in large majority fully accept the grand narrative of evolutionary history. Yet in non-natural scientific fields, the notion that evolution equals 'change-over-time' is a massive claim (gigantic even, as Snagglepuss might express it!), one that can apply to ethics as easily as to agricultural economics or political coups or social work in slums or the daily baseball statistics or reason and
consciousness or gender inequalities or world-systems disequilibrium, etc. etc. etc.
It is really difficult to imagine that scientifically-minded Christians might recognize any of the problems identified above and yet do nothing about them, not even acknowledge that they exist!
'Arggghh...Good Grief!' as Charlie Brown would say. :-?
Arago
From Pascal Boyer's "Why is religion natural?" (2004):
"The lesson of the cognitive study of religion is that religion is rather "natural" in the sense that it consists of by-products of normal mental functioning. Each of the systems described here (a sense for social exchange, a specific mechanism for detecting animacy in surrounding objects, an intuitive fear of invisible contamination, a capacity for coalitional thinking, etc.) is the plausible result of selective pressures on cognitive organization. In other words, these capacities are the outcome of evolution by natural selection. In other words, religious thought activates cognitive capacities that developed to handle non-religious information." (http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-03/religion.html)
http://artsci.wustl.edu/~pboyer/PBoyerHomeSite/articles.html
Jon Tandy <tandyland@earthlink.net> wrote:
Gregory,
If you intend to make a point, I don't know if anyone caught it in the lengthy dialog. How about this, it might help make your point more effectively: Why don't you just list those things which you believe are opposite of "natural" besides the "supernatural". After a simple list of those things, how about a brief explanation of why those things should be considered opposite of natural
Second, I would invite you to defend your statement, "When IDists speak about ‘intelligent causes,’ true, they are constructing themselves against the simple natural/supernatural dichotomy." If ID supporters really believed creation came about from the influence of any of a variety of "intelligent agents" which were potentially not supernatural, this might be a true statement. However, if the published ID concept of "intelligent agent" is really a euphemism for "God" in order to make it potentially acceptable in scientific circles, then I'm not certain your statement is a correct perception of the contribution of ID. I'm not saying there isn't potentially a contribution, but I don't think they have necessarily helped construct a third alternative to "natural" or "supernatural", unless you allow for alien or human Creators, which they don't in their heart of hearts.
Jon Tandy
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Received on Tue Nov 20 12:08:18 2007
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