Mary Midgley |
Several times I have pointed out some of the contradictions stated by naturalist philosophy and its different variants: materialism, reductionism, physicalism, scientism, etc. In the previous post I pointed out that Raymond Tallis has detected two important contradictions that he calls darwinitis and neuromania. In this post I am going to bring together a few more, because when one sees them together their power is multiplied. Here are those I have selected:
- Science is the only valid source of human knowledge: Which science has reached this conclusion? Physics?
Biology? None of the sciences. Therefore, if what this statement says is
true, this statement must be false. We arrive at a contradiction. On the
other hand, if this statement is false, there is no problem. Ergo, this
statement is false. Therefore, scientism (and thus naturalism) is false.
- The self is an illusion:
You,
your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense
of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior
of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (Francis Crick, The
astonishing hypothesis: The scientific search for the soul, 1994). But an illusion is a concept that requires the
existence of a subject who experiences that illusion. Which subject
experiences the illusion of the self, if the self does not exist? We
can get along without believing in God, but can we get along without
believing in ourselves? (Mary
Midgley, Are you an illusion?, 2014).
- Science has proven that miracles do not exist: Stated this way, it seems that the phrase means
something. But it is possible to formulate it in an equivalent way that
makes it clear that it is contradictory: Science
has proven that there are no events inexplicable to science. How can science prove that? It is impossible. What
actually happens is that naturalistic philosophy (which is not science)
affirms this as dogma, without science having said anything about it. And
then they say that this phrase is a result of scientific research, which
is obviously false.
- Nature is subject to laws that are sometimes surprisingly
simple if expressed mathematically.
Naturalist
philosophers think that there is no need
to seek an explanation for the existence of laws, that they are simply
there, for no reason. Therefore, they refuse to find the
reason for some things that we can verify. How does this square with the
claim that science will one day be able to explain everything?
- Naturalist philosophers affirm that the theory of evolution proves
that there is no design in living beings, because
they appeared as a consequence of a mixture of chance and necessity.
However, human beings are capable of carrying out designs that involve
both chance and necessity, such as artificial life
experiments. Why can we do something that nature is not capable of doing?
Aren’t we a part of nature? Obviously yes, we are. Therefore, the previous
statement is false.
- Naturalist
philosophers affirm that in nature there are only efficient causes, that
there are no final causes or purposes.
But we are part of nature and we have purposes. To this they usually answer
that our purposes are an illusion, that everything is decided in advance.
So why make the effort to achieve something? For example, why
strive to convince others of the truth of naturalistic philosophy?
Francis Crick |
In his book La Cosmovisión Naturalista (The Naturalist Worldview), Moisés Pérez Marcos includes a quote
from Richard Lewontin, a naturalist philosopher, that makes things quite clear:
We side with science despite the patent absurdity of some of its
constructs, despite its failure to fulfill many extravagant promises... because
we have an a priori commitment to materialism... Furthermore, this materialism
is absolute, because we cannot let a Divine Foot appear under the door. (Billions and billions of demons, The New
York Review of Books, 44:1 1997).
And Pérez Marcos comments: It seems clear that naturalism, before many other things,
really is anti-theism.
Thematic Thread on Philosophy and Logic: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca
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