There are ways of knowing the world that do not require an objective reality. — T Clark

What are you thinking?

There's a good argument to be made that objective reality is a human construct which boils down to that which can be perceived, conceived, and understood by humans. — T Clark

Yes, it is pretty tedious and there is no consensus on this.

"Truth" is generally defined as congruence with objective reality. — T Clark

'Correspondence' is probably a better word and comes with a venerable if much attacked theory.

I realize that you can claim that the need for purpose and origin are similar to some extent, but science renders their existence suspicious not just by its exploration of the inanimate universe, but also because it conveys to us about our mental fragility and our addiction to self-affirmation. — simeonz

You're aware of the phrase 'the hermeneutics of suspicion'? What if the motivation of this criticism arises not from science per se, but from the 'Enlightenment values' which seek to objectify and instrumentalise.

he universe might be all the explanation there is. It might be its own reason — simeonz

'Cosmos is all there is' saith Carl Sagan. But this is again just scientism speaking - 'cosmos' means 'an ordered whole', and that concept can hardly be maintained in modern cosmology, which according to some critics is Lost in Math.

A question to you: what exactly is the difference between the living and the non-living? — TheMadFool

It's one of those questions, like, 'what is the nature of time', which seems obvious until you try and answer it. I mentioned a NY Times article on the Corona Virus which points out how difficult it is to define the difference precisely. If all those white coats can't work it out, buggered if I will be able to.

Philosophically, I claim an ontological distinction can be discerned between mineral, plant, animal, and rational beings. That harks back to the 'great chain of being' which is not favoured by modern thinking.

But there is some support for at least the first distinction in current science:

Ernst Mayr, one of the architects of the modern [evolutionary] synthesis, has been one of the most outspoken supporters of the view that life is fundamentally different from inanimate matter. In The growth of biological thought, p. 124, he made this point in no uncertain terms: ‘… The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years!’

The idea that ‘life is chemistry plus information’ implies that information is ontologically different from chemistry, but can we prove it? Perhaps the strongest argument in support of this claim has come from Hubert Yockey, one of the organizers of the first congress dedicated to the introduction of Shannon's information in biology. In a long series of articles and books, Yockey has underlined that heredity is transmitted by factors that are ‘segregated, linear and digital’ whereas the compounds of chemistry are ‘blended, three-dimensional and analogue’.

Yockey underlined that: ‘Chemical reactions in non-living systems are not controlled by a message … There is nothing in the physico-chemical world that remotely resembles reactions being determined by a sequence and codes between sequences’ p. 105.

Yockey has tirelessly pointed out that no amount of chemical evolution can cross the barrier that divides the analogue world of chemistry from the digital world of life, and concluded from this that the origin of life cannot have been the result of chemical evolution. This is therefore, according to Yockey, what divides life from matter: information is ontologically different from chemistry because linear and digital sequences cannot be generated by the analogue reactions of chemistry.

At this point, one would expect to hear from Yockey how did linear and digital sequences appear on Earth, but he did not face that issue. He claimed instead that the origin of life is unknowable, in the same sense that there are propositions of logic that are undecidable.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2015.0060

It is perfectly possible to study consciousness on a purely scientific basis — T Clark

Through subjects including cognitive science and psychology, although there will always be a controversy about the degree to which psychology is real science. And what these approaches 'leaves out' is precisely the subject of Chalmer's paper, 'Facing up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness'.

I would also not make a necessary connection between the pursuit of spirituality or philosophy with self knowledge either. It could just as readily be self-deception. — Tom Storm

Delusion and self-deception are certainly pitfalls in any spiritual path. It doesn't mean that there isn't a path to follow.

this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world.“ — Joshs

What they're arguing is that the 'hard problem of consciousness' arises from an artificial distinction. And it does! That is the point. It is implicit in post-Cartesian dualism with its division of mind and body.

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. (pp. 35-36) — Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos, Pp35-36

Their criticism applies equally to this general picture, it is true. But it is that general picture that Chalmers' criticism is addressing.

Phew. Enough already.

Delusion and self-deception are certainly pitfalls in any spiritual path. It doesn't mean that there isn't a path to follow. — Wayfarer

Never said there was not, only that we can't assert it is ipso facto better than naturalism.

Never said there was not, only that we can't assert it is ipso facto better than naturalism. — Tom Storm

But it seeks answers that naturalism cannot. That's where the division really lies. According to naturalism, h. sapiens is another species, a natural occurence. According to the perennial philosophies East and West, h. sapiens is something more than, or other than, that. Man - I'll use 'man' in the old sense, which means 'being' and is not gender specific - embodies a spiritual aspect which transcends nature.

But of course our culture has successfully innoculated us against that understanding.

Sorry- that last line was cynical. But this is what I mean has been 'lost in the wash'. Alfred Russel Wallace, who is credited as the co-discoverer of natural selection, parted company with Darwin on philosophical grounds. Wallace's religious sentiments mean he is largely discounted by subsequent science, but his Darwinism as applied to Man lays out his philosophical view.

A question to you: what exactly is the difference between the living and the non-living? — TheMadFool

If we take Aristotle's perspective, described in "De Anima", On the Soul, the difference is found in the capacities, or powers of the soul, potentia. A living thing is defined by a soul, which is a principle of actuality, or activity. This is similar to vitalism. The living being, by virtue of having a soul, may have a range of different capacities, ranging through self-nutrition, self subsistence, self-movement, sensation, and intellection. The different capacities are understood as residing in the material aspect of the living body. The non-living, lacking a soul as a principle of activity, cannot be said to have these various capacities, which though they reside in the material body are properties of the soul.

just scientism speaking — Wayfarer

Not that you meant this, perhaps, but isn't the tendency to use this word 'scientism' usually a patronizing label? Is applying it to Sagan useful?

Given you are pretty much an atheist (from our pervious conversation), as far as more literalist theists may be concerned, what benefits do you believe your worldview brings, which are not available to the person who thinks the scientific method is the only reliable pathway to truth available to us at the moment?

Forgive the crude summary and feel free to correct me - it sometimes seems to me that you are saying you have greater innate sensitivity because you know that the universe has more in it than matter. My question is where (in general terms) do your presuppositions actually lead you?

what benefits do you believe your worldview brings, which are not available to the person who thinks the scientific method is the only reliable pathway to truth available to us at the moment? — Tom Storm

Since when is the ‘scientific method’ not itself a worldview.? More accurately put, is there any such thing as THE scientific method? A quick glance at the history of philosophy of science shows that science’s understanding of its methods and practices has undergone many shifts over the past centuries. Your particular understanding of the methods of science and their significance and justification belongs to a particular
philosophy of science( a realist , Popperian one), as opposed to a post -realist philosophy of science along the lines of Kuhn, Feyerabend and science studies writers like Joseph Rouse. I suppose one way to define scientism is the mistaken belief that one particular interpretation of the role and methods of science is the one true interpretation.

Since when is the ‘scientific method’ not itself a worldview.? — Joshs

Science is just a tool we can use that has demonstrated consistent reliability and its findings can be replicated or reviewed and perhaps found wanting. It probably never arrives at a final revelation, unlike say, organized religion.

Happy for you to enter into meta-discussion of science's alleged worldview al la Feyerabend, with whom I quite agree that science can go too far in its claims and it can be badly used, like any tool. Although I note that people like Feyeraband are quite pleased to seek evidence based medical treatment when sick, rather than a prayer group.

If you are going to say science is a worldview, fine. So is everything, from medicine to sport. But some worldviews are more helpful than others.

Given you are pretty much an atheist (from our pervious conversation), as far as more literalist theists may be concerned, what benefits do you believe your worldview brings, which are not available to the person who thinks the scientific method is the only reliable pathway to truth available to us at the moment? — Tom Storm

I'll take a swing at this. @Wayfarer and I don't agree on a lot, but I think we share some views and values in this area. I'm a civil engineer. That means, when there is some work to be done, I find out what our client wants, get a survey, do some calculations, make a drawing or two, then get a bunch of bulldozers and knock everything down. That works, to the extent it does, because we follow the typical materialist route of separating our area of interest from the rest of the universe and pretending what we do inside the area doesn't have anything to do with what goes on outside. Yes, I'm oversimplifying the process.

This leads to all sorts of problems. Is there another way, sure - look at the world, forgive me, holistically. As one unified system. There are sciences that do things that way - ecology, geology, evolutionary biology, hydrogeology. Observational rather than experimental sciences.

It's one of those questions, like, 'what is the nature of time', which seems obvious until you try and answer it. I mentioned a NY Times article on the Corona Virus which points out how difficult it is to define the difference precisely. If all those white coats can't work it out, buggered if I will be able to.

Philosophically, I claim an ontological distinction can be discerned between mineral, plant, animal, and rational beings. That harks back to the 'great chain of being' which is not favoured by modern thinking.

But there is some support for at least the first distinction in current science:

Ernst Mayr, one of the architects of the modern [evolutionary] synthesis, has been one of the most outspoken supporters of the view that life is fundamentally different from inanimate matter. In The growth of biological thought, p. 124, he made this point in no uncertain terms: ‘… The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years!’

The idea that ‘life is chemistry plus information’ implies that information is ontologically different from chemistry, but can we prove it? Perhaps the strongest argument in support of this claim has come from Hubert Yockey, one of the organizers of the first congress dedicated to the introduction of Shannon's information in biology. In a long series of articles and books, Yockey has underlined that heredity is transmitted by factors that are ‘segregated, linear and digital’ whereas the compounds of chemistry are ‘blended, three-dimensional and analogue’.

Yockey underlined that: ‘Chemical reactions in non-living systems are not controlled by a message … There is nothing in the physico-chemical world that remotely resembles reactions being determined by a sequence and codes between sequences’ p. 105.

Yockey has tirelessly pointed out that no amount of chemical evolution can cross the barrier that divides the analogue world of chemistry from the digital world of life, and concluded from this that the origin of life cannot have been the result of chemical evolution. This is therefore, according to Yockey, what divides life from matter: information is ontologically different from chemistry because linear and digital sequences cannot be generated by the analogue reactions of chemistry.

At this point, one would expect to hear from Yockey how did linear and digital sequences appear on Earth, but he did not face that issue. He claimed instead that the origin of life is unknowable, in the same sense that there are propositions of logic that are undecidable.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2015.0060 — Wayfarer

Now I feel bad that I threw a difficult question at you. Anyway, it was worth getting your opinion on the matter.

How about this: Since defining life reductively as a chemical process or even in terms of physics is problematic and other approaches to life are equally unsatisfactory, isn't it worth exploring other alternatives?

For instance, life could be defined in terms of intent - that's the closest concept to what I have in mind. All life seems to exhibit intent, living organisms seem to want to do something as opposed to following the normal course of events either chemically or in a physics sense. What I'm getting at is in some sense encapsulated in the expression "a life of its own."

This is only an attempt at a sensible definition of life and, for better or worse, it doesn't seem possible to reduce this notion of life to chemistry or physics.

This leads to all sorts of problems. Is there another way, sure - look at the world, forgive me, holistically. As one unified system. There are sciences that do things that way - ecology, geology, evolutionary biology, hydrogeology. Observational rather than experimental sciences. — T Clark

Ok, holistically is fine - many disciplines that can come together usefully, based around evidence and demonstrable results. If it is observational, it is still part of the extant material world, so technically it is physical and measurable. But where someone says there is a supernatural explanation for a physical phenomenon, I would want demonstrated evidence that this is the case. It is a simple thing.

I am quite certain that science hasn't and perhaps can't explain everything. But the time to believe in a proposition is when there is evidence for it.

But where someone says there is a supernatural explanation for a physical phenomenon, I would want demonstrated evidence that this is the case. — Tom Storm

I don't think @Wayfarer was talking about supernatural phenomena. We'll let him respond.

don't think Wayfarer was talking about supernatural phenomena. We'll let him respond. — T Clark

Wayfarer doesn't really say where his ideas may lead, hence my earlier question. I am simply introducing this as part of the discussion as it is an obvious potential direction. But happy to be told it isn't relevant by W or you.

If you are going to say science is a worldview, fine. So is everything, from medicine to sport. But some worldviews are more helpful than others. — Tom Storm

I would modify that statement to read: science is a word which points to a historically developing progression of worldviews rather than a single worldview, changing in tandem with other aspects of culture. Thus we can speak of Enlightenment , modernist and postmodernist eras of science, literature,art, philosophy, etc. It is the pragmatic usefulness of the larger cultural worldview informing and defining the science of a given era that determines its helpfulness. So I agree that’s some
worldviews are more helpful than others. For instance Popper’s Kantian-inspired modernist view of science as falsificationism is more helpful than Bacon’s Enlightenment hypothetical -indicative definition. And I think Kuhn and Feyerabend’s postmodern view of science is more helpful that Popper’s modernist worldview.
It has been said that modem physics is an instantiation .of a modernist worldview whereas Newtonian physics represented an Enlightenment worldview. The attempt to bring irreversible temporality into the center of physics by researchers like Lee Smolen may indicate the beginnings of a shift of physics into a postmodern science.
The shifts of worldview within the history of psychology can also be noted. Jerry Fodor, one of cognitivism's leading and most eloquent exponents, said that "In intellectual history, everything happens twice, first as philosophy and then as cognitive science.". He added that the only respect in which first generation cognitivism is a major advance over eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representationism is in its use of the computer. Enactivist approaches in cognitive
science represent a shift in worldview within the field
away from modernist realism and representationalism , and in the direction of postmodern intersubjectivity.

But happy to be told it isn't relevant by W or you. — Tom Storm

Someday, in another discussion, we can discuss how God is involved in all this, because it is. But, no, I am not, and I don't think Wayfarer is, talking about anything supernatural.

life could be defined in terms of intent — TheMadFool

I did mention that:

life, even the very simplest forms of life, seem to possess an intentional aim, namely, to survive and propagate — Wayfarer

But do read the passage I quoted from Barbieri again, he makes a great point about the ontological distinction between life and non-life, in scientific terms.

isn't the tendency to use this word 'scientism' usually a patronizing label? Is applying it to Sagan useful? — Tom Storm

'Scientism' is a bit of a boo-word, but some genuinely do espouse it, and Sagan is one. And hey, I really like Sagan, his 60's TV shows and popular writings are fabulous. He has a very nimble imagination, a warm personality, and that sonorous voice. I liked some of his books, especially Contact and Dragons of Eden. But he did sometimes stray into 'scientism'. Richard Lewontin, a biologist, in a review of one of his last books, A Demon-Haunted World, offered this often-quoted paragraph (NY Review of Books, 1/7/97):

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen. — Richard Lewontin

I think that quote says a lot. One of the things I think it says is that, to all intents, for this kind of thinking, science *is* a religion. Hence, 'the religion of scientism'. (And besides, 'believing in God' certainly DOES NOT mean you can 'believe in anything', one of the cogent criticisms of theological reasoning is that it is so circumscribed by dogma. It just means, you accept principles which scientific method has no way of validating.)

it sometimes seems to me that you are saying you have greater innate sensitivity because you know that the universe has more in it than matter. My question is where (in general terms) do your presuppositions actually lead you? — Tom Storm

I'm just a regular person - a 'bombu', in Japanese Buddhist parlance. But I am compelled to follow this path, hence the nickname! I think anyone on a spiritual path has a sense of trying to navigate to a higher destiny.

I'm a civil engineer. That means, when there is some work to be done, I find out what our client wants, get a survey, do some calculations, make a drawing or two, then get a bunch of bulldozers and knock everything down. That works, to the extent it does, because we follow the typical materialist route of separating our area of interest from the rest of the universe and pretending what we do inside the area doesn't have anything to do with what goes on outside. — T Clark

Valuable point! What I think 'scientific materialism' is, is simply the attempt to apply this methodology to the problems of philosophy. That is very much what logical positivism is like, also. Of course, scientific method produces innummerable material benefits (not least for instance vaccines). So I would never criticize scientific methodology or engineering skill when it's applied to those innummerable subjects that benefit from it.

But when it strays into philosophy then it attempts to pronounce on subjects it has no hold over.

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science", says philosopher Jurgen Habermas.

Postmodernism announces (loudly and often) that a supposedly neutral, objective rationality is always a construct informed by interests it neither acknowledges nor knows nor can know (@Joshs). Meanwhile science goes its merry way endlessly inventing and proliferating technological marvels without having the slightest idea of why. The “naive faith” Habermas criticizes is not a faith in what science can do — it can do anything! — but a faith in science’s ability to provide reasons, aside from the reason of its own keeping on going, for doing it and for declining to do it in a particular direction because to do so would be wrong.

I don't think Wayfarer was talking about supernatural phenomena. We'll let him respond. — T Clark

Again, I think our culturally-approved ideas of what is 'natural' and what is 'supernatural' are somewhat artificial. St Augustine said that 'miracles are not against nature, they're against what we understand about nature'. And as one of the other more spiritually-inclined posters on this forum used to point out, 'metaphysics' and 'supernatural' are essentially synonymous terms, the first Greek, the second Latin. But 'supernatural' is the ultimate boo-word in secular culture, the one thing which all sensible folk are admonished to abjure.

So think about this: what is defined as 'natural' by natural philosophy amounts to what can be detected or validated, in principle, by observation (including observation by instruments) and mathematically sound reasoning based on such observations. That is what 'scientific proof' amounts to. In some areas of science, this has generated enormous issues of what counts as 'valid scientific reasoning' - in, for instance, cosmology, with the contentious 'string theory' and multiverse conjecture, and in physics, with the inherently incomplete nature of the 'standard model' (which are aspects of the various crises of physics.)

But leaving that aside, naturalism also methodologically excludes the possibility that there might be alternative cognitive modes or ways-of-knowing about which the sensorily-grounded methods of empirical science can detect nothing. Furthermore, it might be impossible to determine the nature of those kinds of 'modes of knowing' from within the empiricist paradigm, which more or less places the burden of proof on any critics to demonstrate the validity of any such modes in empirical terms. That is what is known as 'stacking the deck'. I think Western culture will easily do that without realising.

I did mention that:

life, even the very simplest forms of life, seem to possess an intentional aim, namely, to survive and propagate
— Wayfarer

But do read the passage I quoted from Barbieri again, he makes a great point about the ontological distinction between life and non-life, in scientific terms. — Wayfarer

:ok: You seem to have your hands full. I'll get back to you later when it gets a little quieter. G'day.

science *is* a religion. — Wayfarer

No. I don't agree. Science is an ideology, not a religion. Religion is... well, no, I don't want to open that door here.

'metaphysics' and 'supernatural' are essentially synonymous terms, — Wayfarer

I don't know how it was used in the olden days, but that's not what "metaphysics" means now. At least that's not all it means.

No. I don't agree. Science is an ideology, — T Clark

You cherry picked that quote: I said ‘for this kind of thinking, science is a religion’. I don’t think that most people see it like that, but it’s a significant strain of thought in come circles.

Science is an ideology, not a religion. — T Clark

Science is many ideologies , or. more precisely, a historical continuum of transforming ideologies, moving in parallel with transformations in all other areas of culture , including and interwoven with the continuum of transforming ideologies of religion.

You cherry picked that quote: I said ‘for this kind of thinking, science is a religion’. I don’t think that most people see it like that, but it’s a significant strain of thought in come circles. — Wayfarer

Not an important point for me in this discussion, but it bothers me in general. I think it is disrespectful to both science and religion.

Science is many ideologies — Joshs

I was using "ideology" in a fairly negative way in my post. Ideology as an inflexible, dogmatic viewpoint.

So do I, that was the point!

concept to what I have in mind. All life seems to exhibit intent, living organisms seem to want to do something as opposed to following the normal course of events either chemically or in a physics sense. What I'm getting at is in some sense encapsulated in the expression "a life of its own." — TheMadFool

It is possible the reason physics and the life sciences do not seem to converge on each other is not that there is something intrinsically different about the nature of life , but that the cocos tula foundation of physics has lagged behind that of evolutionary biology. That was Piaget’s argument. He suggested that physics would eventually catch up with where biology has led, in the same way that biology has recently converged with cognitive science via enactive self -organizing systems models. He mentions that complexity theory and dynamical
systems approaches show how physics can be re-thought as a science of creative self -transformation rather than static equilibrium states, and in this way reveal it to be dealing with ‘intentionality’.

“...physics is far from complete, having so far been unable to integrate biology and a fortiori the behavioural sciences within itsel. Hence, at present, we reason in dififerent and artificially simplified domains, physics being up to now only the science of non-living, non-conscious things. When physics becomes more 'general’, to use C.-E. Guye's striking expression-and discovers what goes on in the matter of a living body or even in one using reason, the epistemological enrichment of the object by the subject which we assume here as a hypothesis, will appear perhaps as a simple relativistic law ot perspective or of co- ordination of referentials, showing that for the subject the object could not be other than it appears to him, but also that from the object's point of view the subject could not be different.”

“ between two structures of different levels there can be no one-way reduction, but rather there is reciprocal assimilation such that the higher can be derived from the lower by means of transformations, while the higher enriches the lower by integrating it. In this way clectro-magnetism has enriched classical mechanics, giving rise to a new mechanics; and gravitation has been reduced to a kind of geometry in which curvature is determined by mass. Similarly we may hope that the reduction of vital processes to physico-chemistry will add new enriching properties to the latter.”

Prigogine's recent work on "dissipative-structures seems to show that the series "organism behavior- sensorimotor -conceptual psvchogenesis could be completed toward the lower end by relating the biological and hence cognitive structures to certain-forms ot dynamic equilibrium in physics (where the study of these structures -was motivated precisely by the need to relate the two disciplines to each other).

I was using "ideology" in a fairly negative way in my post. Ideology as an inflexible, dogmatic viewpoint. — T Clark

Of course, It doesn’t have to be used this way. Ideology can be synonymous with worldview, paradigm or philosophy, which is how I am using it to apply to science.

Thank you for your extensive response.

But leaving that aside, naturalism also methodologically excludes the possibility that there might be alternative cognitive modes or ways-of-knowing about which the sensorily-grounded methods of empirical science can detect nothing. — Wayfarer

No I would say if it exists, we can investigate it. 'Might be' is not 'is'. Otherwise it is woo.

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, — Richard Lewontin

But this and the rest of what he says is just rhetoric without examples.

One of the things I think it says is that, to all intents, for this kind of thinking, science *is* a religion. Hence, 'the religion of scientism'. — Wayfarer

I don't think the case is made at all. All it is trying to do is say that isms are a dirty word and there's an attempt to turn the dreaded R word back on science.

I think anyone on a spiritual path has a sense of trying to navigate to a higher destiny. — Wayfarer

This quote and so many similar from people interested in spirituality just suggests (and you may not be like this) the underlying ethos of elitism and status seeking. I'm special because I have my God/Buddha/Guru/faith/Kabbalah... And of course by way of exquisite contrast the person who just wants evidence before accepting any claims is a lesser course human being. Not that you may be of this ilk.

St Augustine said that 'miracles are not against nature, they're against what we understand about nature'. — Wayfarer

Sophistry. If miracles happen then there would be evidence.

Science is an ideology, not a religion. — T Clark

Everything is ideology if you try hard enough.

My point is simply that we don't accept a belief without good evidence.

I'm special because I have my God/Buddha/Guru/faith/Kabbalah... — Tom Storm

If miracles happen then there would be evidence. — Tom Storm

Are you familiar with the replication crisis? How do you reckon that would play out in respect of this question?