Hope,
Hi Stephen, as I've pointed out before - several times - the issue is that as far as certain people are concerned the only valid evidence is that which is moderated by the scientific method. As you will appreciate, since this method relies solely on the naturalistic, any non-naturalistic evidence is necessarily disallowed by such people. Therefore experience is irrelevant - even though experience is quite an important factor in getting jobs, bringing children up safely, ...
Oh dear. This is just a re-statement of Vlad's "methodological materialism" mistake. "Evidence" is itself a naturalistic concept - it relies on data, testing, falsifiability etc. If you want to call something evidence then you have to play by these rules. If you want to call something
else evidence though, then as ever you have all your work ahead of you to propose a method
of any kind to distinguish this supposed evidence from mistake, misattribution, just guessing, the effects of a bump on the head etc.
However
I have been trying to decide how best to introduce the following for a few days (when I haven't been coughing my guts up and suffering from nasal drip syndrome).
In the past, we have been told here that sceince doesn't deal in right and wrong - yet that is a major part of human life. There are, for instance, the societal rules and regulalations that exist in any society. If sceince doesn't deal with right and wrong, where does the impetus for deciding what is right and what is wrong come from? It clearly can't be a merely naturalistic source, otherwise science would always be able to give imput. So, let's take a couple of examples. Where, if at all, is the naturalistic reasoning behind the idea that one shouldn't lie? or kill (after all most of animal world kill to survive and we don't seem to regard this as unacceptable). On the other end of the spectrum, there is the issue of speeding. There was scientific evidence used to install the current 70mph limit here in the UK - though I'm told that modern research has largely refuted that evidence.
Seriously?
Seriously seriously?
First, "science" has a great deal to say about the biological basis of morality - try reading Bill Hamilton for starters for example. Briefly, codes of behaviour we call “moral” tend to favour the survivial of the genome and we can demonstrate this readily with careful observation of the species that practice it.
Second, even if science can't currently explain something that doesn't give you free reign to decide that the answer must therefore be non-naturalistic. This "reasoning" is essentially that used to explain that thunder and lightning was Thor chucking his hammer around.
Third, if you want to claim the supposed non-naturalistic as a fact then you also have all your work ahead of you first to define it, and second to demonstrate it.
Fourth, if you actually mean something like “science can’t tell us what’s right and what’s wrong” then the question itself is misguided because it assumes an empirical answer that’s “out there”, something for which there’s no evidence whatever. That said, if we’re to look anywhere for answers to these questions then as Sam Harris has argued using the tools of reason and logic seem more likely to give us more reliable answers than pointing to ancient texts and the personal “faith” of some people that those texts must be true.
Obviously, it is very hard to provide a naturalistically valid methodology for parts of our lives that go beyond the natural…
That’s just incoherent. What on earth makes you think that there are “parts of our lives that go beyond the natural”?
- but then of course even the die-hard scientific naturalists here turn to 'magic' when they invoke 'spontaneous healing' - something that doesn't fit in the
scientific lexicon at all. They have no answer to the situation so make things up.
And that’s just stupid. “Spontaneous healing” refers to an unexpected recovery from illness for reasons that aren’t well understood. Maybe one day they will be understood, maybe we’ll never know but either way that says not one jot of an iota of a smidgin to the cause being “not natural”, and moreover no-one with a functioning brain thinks the cause to be “magic”.
Apart from that though…
