FB
October 26, 2010 • 5:13 am
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
So, that means you have the right answer and you expressed it in a simple clear direct manner without the superfluous verbiage and obfuscation that philosophers typically use. Your philosophy is primitive but elegant.
I generally like Massimo and philosophy but these whiny attacks are uncalled for. I had the following exchange with him on Twitter:
http://bit.ly/ccxf9s
For ‘primitive’ read ‘closer to your roots’! In the picture you look like you are trying to decide between a bialy & a knish.
It’s interesting that someone would compare Coyne’s blog postings to a refereed publication, as if anyone ever thought that they were supposed to stand toe-to-toe. Blogs will always express their content in a loose way. What else was Mr. Pieret expecting?
Anyway. Putting that aside, the important thing to note here is that John hasn’t made an effective case against the paper that Coyne mentioned (by Maarten Boudry, Stefaan Blancke and Johan Braeckman, or “BBB”). His critique is here: http://dododreams.blogspot.com/, in the post titled “Method and Madness”.
In that post, while Pieret rebuts an *illustraton* that BBB use in their paper, he does not make an effective case against their *argument*. BBB can always concoct a new thought-experiment that meets his challenge: say, where Catholic prayers are (somehow) shown to reliably cause the patients to recover.
Surely, this discovery would lead to a change of metaphysics, or a revolution in how people understand the universe they live in. But, contrary to what Pieret asserts (without argument), it seems as though there’s a relevant sense in which science itself will have changed. Completely new research programs will open up, producing new fields of scientific theology. Methodologies will be altered, to check for supernatural confounds; priests will have to be on hand during one half of double-blind studies to see the effects of prayer. Worse, people will start asking: where else can we find the divine hand? What else could we be wrong about? The entire corpus of scientific knowledge will need to be radically revised, to make room for the scientific theologican’s picture. Just as BBB (and Coyne) argue, the method follows the metaphysics, and vice-versa.
I generally just avoid philosophy. With respect to religion, I’m very much a “show me the evidence” type guy. Philosophy makes ponderous arguments from a paucity of evidence.
It’s amazing how often “clear and lucid” is mistaken for primitive. Apparently you can only be a “sophisticated philosopher”, if you talk as if you poop thesauri for a living and laypeople are not able to understand you.