Re: [asa] Science's Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism

David -

Law - i.e., the kind of law in your field - is not simply an explanation of the way things happen in the world. It speaks about the way things are supposed to happen or not happen, ways of trying to enforce those rules & penalties if they're violated. (Of course I'm oversimplifying vastly - no insult to the legal tradition or profession intended.) That's true whether we're talking about natural law, statute law, &c. & that's quite different from what's done in the natural or social sciences, which try to say how things always do happen under certain conditions (even if only statistically) & to a certain extent why they happen. "Thou shalt not commit adultery," "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" or "Speed limit 65 MPH" are different kinds of laws from "A perpetual motion machine of the first kind cannot be constructed." The former can in fact be violated. The latter cannot, at least as far as we know.

So even if one accepts the idea of natural law, & evn if one thinks - which is an additional assumption - that its origin must be ascribed to God, I don't really see any challenge to MN here. That has to do with our ability to describe the world, not with our attempt to say what people should or should not do.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: David Opderbeck
  To: George Murphy
  Cc: Gregory Arago ; asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Saturday, July 21, 2007 1:45 PM
  Subject: Re: [asa] Science's Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism

  George said: Let's cut to the chase: Is it legitimate to invoke God as an explanatory factor in sociology?

  Anyone interested in the methods of sociology as they relate to broader ideas about knowledge and theology needs to read John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory (http://tinyurl.com/2p2w7m ) and to consider the vast, dense, and growing literature of the Radical Orthodoxy movement (http://www.calvin.edu/~jks4/ro/). There are quite a few very serious theologians, political scientists, and social theorists in the RO vein who will say that it is illegitimate not to start with God when doing social theory.

  In my discipline, law, it could well be "legitimate" to invoke God. There's a long tradition of natural law jurisprudence, and that tradition is rooted in a belief that God is the ultimate author of law. But curiously, that tradition evaporated largely because of developments in the history and philosophy of science, particularly after Darwin, Einstein and Heisenberg, that spilled over into arguments about epistemology.

  Law was in fact considered a "scientific" discipline in the heyday of natural law "formalism" in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. William Blackstone's famous "Commentaries on the Laws of England" was an effort to demonstrate how the common law tradition derives from first princples of natural law, cast in the vein of a scientific enterprise. American lawyer Christopher Langdell, who was Dean of Harvard Law School in the late 1800's, pioneered the case method of legal study, which was an effort to create a "scientific" method of deriving universal, natural law principles from the opinions of the common law courts. Blackstone and Langdell were very much men of the English-Scottish Enlightenment, who thought science was an effort to examine the entire universe God had created, including the moral law.

  This "formalist" notion of law as a scientific effort to discern the natural law came under attack in the early 20th Century by jurisprudes such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. who had been deeply influenced by Darwin and Spencer. Formalism eventually was overthrown and replaced by what was seen as a more realist view of law: law was not scientifically derived from first principles, but arose organically from social experience. As Holmes famously put it, "The life of the law has not been logic[;] it has been experience" and "[Law] corresponds at any given time with what is understood to be convenient. That involves continual change, and there can be no eternal order."

  One version of this realist view of law, called legal positivism, was a sort of nihlistic view that the law is whatever a person in power says it is. After the two world wars, that view came to be seen as inadequate, and was largely replaced with a more moderate realism which fit closely with the pragmatist turn in American epistemology represented by John Dewey. The more nihlistic view, however, arguably reasserted itself in the 1960's and 70's under the banner of "critical legal studies," which understands law as rival assertions of power, usually involving race and class.

  Today, I would say that some sort of pragmatist paradigm still governs the landscape, but an increasing number of legal scholars have grown dissatisfied with the merely pragmatic vs. merely nihlistic paradigm. There is an ongoing effort in some circles to rehabilitate and update natural law jurisprudence. Others are looking to earlier notions of the virtues as a broader ground for law.
  Two excellent recent books on these subjects are Brian Z. Tamanaha, Law as a Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law (http://tinyurl.com/3xcw92) and James Hackney, Under Cover of Science: American Legal-Economic Theory and the Quest for Objectivity ( http://tinyurl.com/2qyeb4)

  All of this is to say that it does seem difficult to consider how a notion of "methodological naturalism" can apply outside the natural sciences. In fact, it's arguable that extending the MN concept to fields such as law and sociology inevitably results in an impoverished understanding of human nature and bad, or at least less good, public policy.

  On 7/20/07, George Murphy <gmurphy@raex.com> wrote:
>
>
> Gregory -
>
> Let's cut to the chase: Is it legitimate to invoke God as an explanatory factor in sociology? If a sociologist, as sociologist, explains the rise of some popular movement ( e.g.) by saying, at greater or lesser length, "God did it," will such an explanation be considered appropriate by the community of sociologists as a whole?
>
> Shalom
> George
> http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Gregory Arago
> To: George Murphy ; Vernon Jenkins ; David Opderbeck ; Ted Davis
> Cc: PvM ; asa@calvin.edu ; (Matthew) Yew Hock Tan
> Sent: Friday, July 20, 2007 7:57 PM
> Subject: Re: [asa] Science's Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism
>
>
> George -
>
> Good. Then you are willing to acknowledge that there is more than ONE scientific method and by that you acknowledge that MN is not the ONLY way for doing science. This is all I ask.
>
> You say 'It works' and I say 'It is limited.' That's the difference. Sociology and anthropology and other not-natural academic fields are thus free to use something other than MN...AND actually still qualify as 'science,' as loose or tight as that now-fuzzy term may be. The question is not about whether theology justifies MN or not - theology could just as easily justify methods used in cultural studies or anthropology as it could studies in natural sciences.
>
> Natura naturans, as used by one of its main proponents B. Spinoza, actually supports my view that TE's, in potentially confronting 'theological naturalism' (TN), will be expected to clarify their allegiances and distinguish scientism from responsible science. 'Nature in the active sense' is what intelligent design would mean if it got around to proposing what 'designing' is. Only Ian S. in this thread got around to addressing 'information,'which is not merely 'natural' as NS's study things.
>
> Natura naturata refers to 'already created' nature (and other things), which is well suited (via front-loading) to a deist position whereby a continuing creation is misplaced. I see no help in your appeal to Ted's position in that the only thing he was willing to admit a few months ago that doesn't evolve is God. That's not very risky and certainly not full of potential according to Lakatos, Popper or Feyerabend. Such a position (TE) gives far too much credit to (neo-)Darwinism and leaves little room for flexibility, curiousity and novelty about where science may still make discoveries. We are highly likely to become post-Darwinists someday, despite the coming protests of TE's who are too close to Darwin's agnostic (scientific) method!
>
> "far from being an invention of the scientific revolution or the Enlightenment, it is an old scholastic distinction." - George
>
> Then welcome to the 21st century! :-) There is little place for old scholasticism in light of our new paradigms. Please don't foist obsolete views on me as if they are current - they are not. Natural/Supernatural is passe - it's time you deal with this! What is called into question in this thread is whether scientific naturalism is a religion. By leaning on a convenient dichotomy, nothing new is offered. MN is still just a crutch. The definition Janice provided seems to suit your (physics/theology) approach to a T ( i.e. justifying naturalism for religious reasons).
>
> "Theological naturalism has no way to distinguish a paradigm problem from a research problem." - C. Hunter (theist)
>
> I don't disagree with George's theology of the cross (how could a Christian do such a thing?). What I do disagree with is the smuggling in of physicalism and naturalism into one's definition of 'science' and then suggesting that it is somehow a kind of 'universal' expectation for all scientists to adhere to just because it (sometimes) works! Such a position is over-reaching and an attempt to force natural science upon all other spheres (in a Kuyperian sense) of knowledge in the academy which should rather be left free to investigate phenomena as they see fit. In other words, don't try to tie knots around anthropology, sociology, culturology, economics and other social-humanitarian fields ( i.e. as if they are merely 'natural,' end of story) just because you presume a kind of 'naturalism' that tentatively holds for your own specialized field(s) of knowledge. Rather leave them free (by openly expressing their freedom) than attempting to passively constrain them with methods that do not properly fit.
>
> The idea of 'MN works - end of discussion' is a kind of intolerant bias that damages rather than encourages interdisciplinary dialogue. After Pope Benedict's recent statement challenging Christian unity, what an ecumenical view might hope for (which Lutherans sometimes support) is a salutary approach rather than a hierarchical negative privileging of natural sciences in the name of theological naturalism.
>
> The supposed fact that more social-humanitarian thinkers are agnostics or atheists than natural scientists indicates that the dominance of natural scientific approaches to philosophy and sociology is already overrun and due for change. It is time that natural scientists step outside of their comfortable box of discourse to recognize that this era demands more than they have thus far given. By acknowleging the limits of 'theological naturalism,' adequate space can be provided for non-naturalistic thinkers who are still methodologically inclined.
>
> After all, when speaking theologically one could call upon the Methodists (i.e. a branch of Protestants) for their contribution, which would thoroughly undermine George's claim that MN is the only way (eh?). Instead, by admitting that MN is one way among other ways, a more equitable playing field can be prepared for discourse where natural sciences are not privileged, yet still respected for their contextual contribution to knowledge and understanding of human life, meaning, purpose and values. This is, after all, what natural science should supplement, rather than stifling.
>
> Or so it seemeth to me,
> G.
>
>

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Received on Sat Jul 21 20:05:10 2007