Jim wrote: For [C.S.] Lewis, this [anti-materialist] line of argument is simply a way to keep God in the picture.
There's a whole lot of that going on, in my experience.
My own position is rather idiosyncratic because I am a crusty atheist and champion of consensus science on the one hand, but a pluralist about reasonableness on the other, in that I think different criteria warrant as reasonable our judgments about scientific, legal, aesthetic, moral, ethical, political, even more circumscribed professional questions.
Sometimes I sympathize more with the arguments of religious folks (of whom I am not one) against atheists (of whom I am one) who want to be too imperializing about reducing all endeavor and value into terms they fancy to be properly scientific -- a project that seems to me to have nothing to do with science (let alone atheism), properly so-called.
While I don't believe in God I do follow a path of perverse private perfections exploring and appreciating the delights of the world or the pursuit of my own thoughts in ways that are far from entirely justified by the terms that justify and warrant (and rightly so) our beliefs in respect to consensus science where matters of prediction and control are concerned. A reasonable person is not only capacitated but capacious, and this is all good.
When a materialist declares a pragmatist to be relativist you can be sure he is revealing that his is a fundamentalist rather than properly scientific materialism. When a naturalist declares pluralism supernatural you can be sure he is revealing that his science has been commandeered by a reductionist project that has nothing to do with science properly so-called.
On the other hand, I do wish that those who complain about materialism or naturalism or science and then always freight these terms with words like "merely," "simply," "random" and so on [as many do in the examples Jim provides in his exposition in the Moot --d] would be much clearer that it is reductionism and scientism that they really oppose. Opposing these leaves plenty of reasonable conceptions of consensus science, materialism, naturalism cheerfully intact -- and it provides nothing I can see to reassure the faithful in their beliefs in a creator-god or guardian angel or eternal life or a superhuman judge punishing the wicked and rewarding the well-meaning after life as too rarely happens, demoralizingly enough, here on earth.
> When a materialist declares a pragmatist to be relativist
ReplyDelete> you can be sure he is revealing that his is a fundamentalist
> rather than properly scientific materialism. When a naturalist
> declares pluralism supernatural you can be sure he is
> revealing that his science has been commandeered by a
> reductionist project that has nothing to do with science
> properly so-called.
Yes, well, you remember what William James said about that
sort of thing.
"The history of philosophy is to a great extent
that of a certain clash of human temperaments. . .
Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason,
so [a philosopher] urges impersonal
reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament
really gives him a stronger bias than any of his
more strictly objective premises. . . He trusts his
temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he
believes in any representation of the universe that does
suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key
with the world's character, . . . incompetent and
'not in it,' in the philosophic business. . .
Now the particular difference of temperament that
I have in mind. . . is one
that has counted in literature, art, government,
and manners as well as in philosophy. In manners
we find formalists and free-and-easy persons.
In government, authoritarians and anarchists. In
literature, purists or academicals, and realists.
In art, classics and romantics. . . [I]n philosophy we
have a very similar contrast expressed in the pair
of terms 'rationalist' and 'empiricist,'
'empiricist' meaning your lover of facts in all
their crude variety, 'rationalist' meaning your
devotee to abstract and eternal principles. No one
can live an hour without both facts and principles,
so it is a difference rather of emphasis; yet it
breeds antipathies of the most pungent character
between those who lay the emphasis differently. . ."
-- William James, _Pragmatism_ (1907)
Lecture 1, "The Present Dilemma in Philosophy"
"The Truth: what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind!
I read in an old letter -- from a gifted friend who died too
young -- these words: 'In everything, in science, art, morals
and religion, there must be one system that is right and
every other wrong.' How characteristic of the enthusiasm
of a certain stage of youth! At twenty-one we rise to such a
challenge and expect to find the system. It never occurs to
most of us even later that the question 'what is the truth?' is
no real question (being irrelative to all conditions) and that
the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the
fact of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase
like the Latin Language or the Law."
-- William James, _Pragmatism_ (1907)
Lecture 7, "Pragmatism and Humanism"