3 Academic Professors get Evolution Completely Wrong.

“Three academic professors”... What’a next, a fowl chicken?

I've been avoiding posting for a couple of months and the reason for that is probably summed up in this thread and that statement being typical of the pointlessness of debate here. Taken at face value, that statement negates just about all of the debate that has taken place here because most of the argument here is challenging precisely those metaphysical presumptions. Honestly, I read something like that and think: what's the point?

Just to add some meat to the bare bones of a response (though it will, no doubt, be ignored or hand-waved away), here are a few examples of what frustrates me about that statement. A thread was started here some time ago about the Galileo Commission which is an attempt by some scholars, philosophers and scientists to move beyond those very assumptions/presumptions. Here is a summary of that argument from their web page.


We here might take issue with some of the findings of the Galileo Commission Report (and those concerns are expressed in the above-linked thread) but I would have thought that the above summary could be agreed upon by most of us. Skeptics, on the other hand, might argue that the above argument comes from the "usual suspects" - spiritually inclined people who don't do science. I'd recommend anyone who believes that to check out the many advisors who include working scientists and at least one Nobel Prize (physics) winner. Nevertheless, the same point about materialist assumptions has been made by somewhat less spiritually-inclined commentators. Here, John Horgan (an atheist) writes about the ideas of Thomas Nagel (another atheist), both confirming the point about materialist assumptions.

Is Scientific Materialism "Almost Certainly False"?


Finally, I'll add a quote from an article on The Secular Web - definitely NOT spiritually inclined - arguing that naturalism (including Methodological Naturalism) excludes the supernatural a priori.

What's interesting about the Galileo Commission is that they specifically refer to findings from the use of methodological naturalism ("well documented empirical phenomena") in support of their assertions that the presuppositions of naturalism, materialism and reductionist-empiricist are mistaken. In my eyes, this is additional support for the idea that methodological naturalism can operate in the absence of metaphysical presumptions. If methodological naturalism leads us to findings which contradict materialist assumptions, or to findings which establish supernatural causes (both of these claims are made by parapsychologists and proponents), then regardless of all the philosophical mutterings on the subject or the prejudices of its practitioners, it demonstrates that methodological naturalism in practice doesn't need presuppositions to tell us something useful.

The article on the Secular Web also makes the distinction between the presumption of Naturalism and the practice of science. Methodological Naturalism only excludes a narrow and specific definition of "supernatural" which is not the definition in broad use here or worldwide. That is, "supernatural" is that which is not accessible through personal experience or events, under Philosophical Naturalism. Yet most people refer to personal experiences and events as examples of the "supernatural", which would be accessible under Methodological Naturalism. The connection drawn between Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism is that, as the findings from Methodological Naturalism pile up and continue to have an appearance consistent with Philosophical Naturalism (thereby failing to find a space for "supernatural"), it starts to seems reasonable to assume Philosophical Naturalism as a metaphysical position. (Please note, I do not agree with that particular idea.)

I agree that this makes metaphysical debates about moving beyond materialist assumption/presumptions pointless, for those whose interest lies away from metaphysics and towards methodology. It was not my intention to present this information as an argument that those debates are pointless. Clearly they are not regarded as pointless, since the bulk of debate here seems to fall along those lines. I just wanted to present a perspective which explains why the "skeptics" here seem to ignore the debate, or any contributions seem to hand-wave away concerns.

Linda