Pages

▼

Friday, July 12, 2019

Epistemology, Ontology, Creationism and Scientism

 Contemporary North American young earthism is a modern  construction
coming out of the 1960s. Ken Ham can say what he likes!


I recently got some come back from Joe Smith who first made a starring appearance on my blog here. After some mutually cross words with him there was a calming down period after which the relationship settled down to a more cordial basis. The lesson is: If you want to stand chance of making an initial connection use emotive language. 

I think it is fair to say that Joe Smith, when he thinks about creation,  has what I would call certain fundamentalist habits mind, but signs are that those exclusivist fundamentalist attitudes (which really mark out a fundamentalist) are not his strong point (I hope). If they were there would be little to be gained in dialogue as hard core fundamentalists, from Mormons through Jehovah's witnesses  to Answer in Genesis start from a position of assumed spiritual superiority and have a deep distrust of those who don't acquiesce to the divine authority of their opinions.

Anyway I'm hoping for a fruitful discussion. My reply to Joe's first email can be picked up here: This has been a useful exercise as it has summarised my views on epistemology and directly challenges the fundamentalist "Historical science vs Observational science" canard.

***

It is perhaps ironic that I would also use the views I express in my reply to Joe Smith to attack the kind of atheist scientism which has a vested interested in attempting to draw a sharp line of demarcation between formal science and studies deemed to lie outside formal science. This is the so-called demarcation problem: For me it has always been a pseudo problem; all attempts  to understand the cosmos entail a tense dialogue between theory and experience, whether we are talking spring extending and test tube precipitating science or sociology; both disciplines use a juxtaposition of experiences and/or observational protocols and imaginative narratives to explain those experiences/observations but with varying degrees of plausibility; for clearly the highly regular world of springs and chemicals is far more systemically accessible than the erratic and complex objects of sociology. Consequently this leads to firmer based science than can ever be hoped for than in much sociology. There is a trade off between the complexity and accessibility of an object of study and its epistemic robustness.

But the suspected underlying motive for those peddling scientism is not unlike that of fundamentalists who (want to?) see the world in the blacks and whites of in-groups and out-groups. The aficionados of scientism seek clear cut criteria distinguishing science and non-science in order to provide a pretext to cast into the outer darkness anything they regard as beyond the intellectual pale and which can then be written off with emotive words such as "irrational" and "superstition" and therefore invalid knowledge.

It is true, however, that in the contention between experience and those narratives which attempt to make sense of experience we find that some conceptions are far less amenable to experiential investigation than others. (e.g. springs vs sociological objects). But you can be sure that as epistemic tractability fades out human stupidity and epistemic arrogance tend to fade in and this epistemic sin recurs with both atheists and theists.

Below are some of my posts on the subject of science and epistemology. As I review these posts I notice that one name keeps popping up: That of Toronto biochemist Larry Moran. So, as far as Quantum Non-Linearity is concerned there seems to be enough prima facie evidence to charge Moran with the sin of scientism. I present the documentary evidence for that prima facie case below.
at

No comments:

Post a Comment